Loggerhead sea turtles rehabilitated by the New England Aquarium and returned to the wild are providing new information about the sea turtles’ survival and behavior after recovery.
The New England Aquarium’s Sea Turtle Hospital in Quincy, MA has been rescuing, treating, and releasing multiple sea turtle species for over 30 years and has admitted over 500 turtles in just the past three years. As loggerhead sea turtle populations are in decline, such efforts are especially important for this species.
To better understand the lives of rehabilitated loggerheads in the wild, Aquarium veterinarians and scientists acquired a federal permit to track recovered turtles that were originally stranded near and then returned to Massachusetts waters. This required surgically implanting acoustic tags that could transmit data via satellite and cannot be easily dislodged during the study period. Such tools are commonly used to track the movements of highly mobile ocean animals, as they send ‘pings’ into the water that are detected by listening stations when the animal swims within its vicinity.
Listening stations between Massachusetts and Florida recorded nearly 6,000 pings from loggerheads between August 2021 and July 2024. These acoustic data show that all loggerhead turtles tagged and released in 2021 and 2022 are not only surviving, but continue to return to established feeding grounds along the New England coast, particularly Cape Cod.
“These acoustic transmitters are telling us that rehabilitated sea turtles can survive beyond that first year, and they are showing up in well-established feeding areas. That gives us confidence in their ability to reintegrate into the wild population,” said Dr. Kara Dodge, a research scientist at the Aquarium’s Anderson Cabot Center for Ocean Life. “We’re also finding that some turtles are returning to New England waters in the summer and fall, which was surprising and tells us this area may be more important for loggerheads than we previously thought.”
The next phase of this work is to expand the acoustic tags to Kemp’s ridley and green sea turtles that have been treated at the Aquarium and see if they follow the same pattern, with the potential to receive data from transmitters through 2032. As all three species are protected by the U.S. Endangered Species Act and share many of the same threats (entanglement in fishing gear, loss of nesting habitat, turtle and egg harvesting, marine debris, vessel strikes, and climate change), understanding how their behaviors overlap or deviate from one another could inform conservation management and policy actions.
According to Dr. Charles Innis, the senior scientist and Aquarium veterinarian that developed the internal acoustic tagging procedure for sea turtles, “If we continue to gather data for larger numbers of turtles in New England waters, we will likely have a better understanding of when they are typically present and where they spend their time, both of which may inform future protective measures.”
The Aquarium and its Anderson Cabot Center for Ocean Life’s Sea Turtle Tracker is an interactive map that allows members of the public to view the journeys of individual sea turtles and learn more about each species.
