Long-range recovery of a tagged yearling Chelonia on the east coast of North America
Carr A and Sweat DE. 1969. Long-range recovery of a tagged yearling Chelonia on the east coast of North America. Biological Conservation. 1(4):341-342
During the past 12 years Carr ( cf 1968) has been directly or indirectly involved in projects in which some eight thousand sea turtles, belonging to all the five recognized genera and in various stages of development, have been tagged.t As a rule, to be of value the results of such programmes must accumulate in volume. Once in a while, however, special circumstances impart special significance to individual tag recoveries. For example, the first recovery from the tagging programme begun in 1955 at the Tortuguero nesting ground of Chelonia in Costa Rica, was made in the Miskito Cays, off Nicaragua, precisely where widespread local belief held that the Tortuguero breeding colony came from (Carr & Giovannoli, 1957). The return was thus the first firm corroporation that Chelonia is a migratory animal. Another such case was one of Peter C. H. Pritchard's tags that came back when 1:1 Green Turtle (Chelonia mydas), tagged at Bigi Santi Beach, Surinam, was retaken 6 weeks later 1000 miles (1600 km) upstream in the Equatorial Current, across the Equator, near San Luis, Brazil (Pritchard, in press). This suggested that Braziiian turtles are recruited from two widely-separated nesting grounds: the Surinam rookery and that revealed by our earlier tagging project at Ascension Island (Carr & Hirth, 1962; Carr, 1966). Dual recruitment on residence grounds had not been indicated before.
- Type
- Journal Article
- Authors
- Carr, Archie; Sweat, Donald
- Units
- SFCN
- Keywords
- Marine Ecology, migration behavior, migratory habitats, Nesting grounds, turtle monitoring