Turtle SHELL-FIE! WAVE hello!
This is Sandra Tsing Loh with the Loh Down on Science.
Tracking sea creatures in the ocean can help us conserve endangered species.
Enter Jessica Harvey-Carroll and team from the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. They wanted to better understand sea turtle migration.
Using time depth recorders, they collected dive data at five minute intervals for nine months. Machine learning models observed how deep and how long the turtles dive.
Results? They learned the turtles’ seasonal behavior patterns … when they’re resting, foraging, exploring, or deep diving.
These findings allow us to watch over our endangered friends, and hopefully keep ships away.
Why? Because in the immortal words of the original viral video, “I like turtles!”
Reference: Harvey-Carroll, J., Menéndez-Blázquez, J., Crespo-Picazo, J. L., Sagarminaga, R., & March, D. (2025). Unlocking sea turtle diving behaviour from low-temporal resolution time-depth recorders. Scientific reports, 15(1), 19934. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-025-05336-y