AICM satellite tracked loggerhead sea turtles from Mozambique 2012 under SWIOFP

Associação para Investigação Costeira e Marinha
Institut Français pour L'Exploitation de la Mer
Kélonia

As part of Component 5 of the South West Indian Ocean Fisheries Project (SWIOFP; http://www.swiofp.net), three Loggerhead turtles (named "Lurdes", "Esperança" and "Mingas") nesting at the Ponta do Ouro Partial Marine Reserve (POPMR) were satellite tagged (Telonics Argos Marine Transmitters TAM-2639).The loggerhead turtles had contrasting migratory routes: Lurdes immediately initiated a near-shore northbound migration, travelling approximately 634 km (monitored distance) during the 15-day monitoring period and probably the turtle was poached, as the last signal from the tag was sent from 2 km inland next to a hut, closed to Baía dos Cocos in Inhambane Province, Mozambique. Mingas was monitored for 73 days and similarly traveled along the coast, all the way to Mozambique Island and across the Mozambique Channel to the NE coast of Madagascar, traversing 3,270 km (ca 2,025 km straight distance).Finally, Esperança was tracked for 2,608 km during 187 days. This turtle travelled along the coast approximately 250 km north (straight distance) of the nesting beach and reached, what is believed to be her feeding grounds on the Mozambique coast between Macaneta and Xai-Xai. This results shows that despite being protected nationally and internationally, poaching is still a serious threat to the conservation of marine turtles in Mozambique (and in the region), which warrants further efforts for their protection.

The purpose of satellite tagging was to analyse loggerhead post-nesting migration, potential feeding grounds as well as population overlap in the Indian Ocean.

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The dataset has been updated over time as outlined below. Each entry includes the version number, release date, type of change, and a short description.

Overview

Attributes described below represent those in the original dataset provided by the provider.
All attributes are included in the downloadable file (CSV or ESRI File Geodatabase) for "Complete Set of Dataset".

Attributes in dataset

Attribute (table column)	Description
oid	Unique ID number (generated by OBIS-SEAMAP)
latitude	Latitude in decimal degrees
longitude	Longitude in decimal degrees
tag_id	Tag ID
obs_datetime	Date and time of observation in local time calculated by OBIS-SEAMAP
datetime_utc	Date and time of observation in UTC
lc	Location class
time_zone	Time zone of the obs_time values (always UTC)
obs_count	Number of animals (always 1)
age_class	Age (always Adult)
sp_tsn	ITIS Taxonomic Serial Number added by OBIS-SEAMAP
sp_obs	Species name recorded
provider	Data provider
owner	Data owner
tagging_lat	Latitude of tagging location
tagging_lon	Longitude of tagging location
country	Country
geom	Geometry field added by OBIS-SEAMAP