Sea Turtle Secrets

This is part 1 of Sea Soul Secrets, a 9-part series about the real animals behind the Sea Soul charms. We start with the sea turtle, an animal that crosses oceans and still finds its way back to one stretch of coast.

Hatchlings carry a magnetic map. In experiments by Kenneth Lohmann and colleagues, published in Science in 2001, young loggerhead turtles swam in a seawater pool ringed by computer-controlled magnetic coils. When the coils copied the magnetic field found off northern Florida, the hatchlings swam southeast. When they copied a field from near the southern part of the North Atlantic gyre (a huge loop of ocean currents), the turtles turned west-northwest.

They come home to nest. NOAA Fisheries says adult female green turtles usually return to a beach in the general area where they hatched. Every 2 to 5 years, adults travel from their feeding grounds to the waters off those beaches. A female lays about 110 eggs in each nest and nests every 2 weeks over several months.

Diets differ by species. Green turtles are the only sea turtles that are herbivores, eating mainly algae and seagrass. Leatherbacks cannot crush hard shells, so they eat soft prey of the open ocean such as jellyfish and salps (salps are jelly-like drifting animals).

Leatherbacks are also record divers. NOAA Fisheries notes a deepest recorded dive of nearly 4,000 feet, dives lasting up to 85 minutes, and some leatherbacks swimming more than 10,000 miles a year between nesting and feeding grounds.

Meet Gentle Turtle in the Sea Soul collection.