Scientists shed new light on the mysterious ‘lost years’ of sea turtles

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• John Yang:

  Finally tonight, a story about new insights into one of Earth's most ancient living creatures, sea turtles.

• John Yang (voice-over):

  Its tiny flippers churning sand, this newly hatched sea turtle heads toward the ocean just as generations of its ancestors have done for more than 100 million years. Considered one of the oldest living species on Earth, it's been a mystery where baby sea turtles go after heading out to sea. It's known as their lost years.

• Kate Mansfield, Marine Turtle Research Group:

  Because we don't have that information, it's really hard for us to develop management plans and conservation measures to best protect these animals.

• John Yang (voice-over):

  Kate Mansfield and the team of marine scientists she leads at the University of Central Florida are working to change that. The breakthrough came after they attached specially sized geolocator devices to 114 wild sea turtle shells in the waters off the Gulf Coast.

• Kate Mansfield:

  This is a standard satellite tag for larger animals. And this is bigger than some baby hatchlings, so we needed something that was smaller. Here's one. And here's the other. They're ideal candidates for something that can recharge over time and allow us to figure out their locations without hurting them.

• John Yang (voice-over):

  For more than a decade, they tracked young sea turtles whereabouts to better understand their migration patterns. The data Mansfield's team collected revealed that in just a few months, the turtles traveled more than 1,000 miles, swimming between relatively shallow waters closer to shore and the deep open ocean, a much wider area than scientists had previously thought.

• Kate Mansfield:

  We ended up realizing that these are animals that are actively swimming some of the time, and that means that they may not be passively drifting and entrained within an area that could be impacted by human activities like an oil spill.

• John Yang (voice-over):

  Mansfield says the research will help federal agencies like the National Marine Fisheries Service protect endangered turtle species in their habitats.

• Kate Mansfield:

  Our long held assumptions about these animals may not be 100% correct, in part because it's very hard to find them offshore. So we've improved the best available data on these animals. I would say that is one of the best and most fun things about this project.