Olive ridley sea turtle tracking near Ghana 2009

Phil Allman, Florida Gulf Coast University

Marine turtles have complex life cycles that include long-distance movements across coastal and pelagic habitats to access juvenile nurseries, foraging grounds, and eventually breeding grounds. Understanding these movement patterns is important for knowing habitat requirements and potential mortality risks for populations on a local, regional, and global scale. This knowledge is critically needed to inform resource managers and adopt best management practices for all populations. Although we are starting to understand the migration patterns for some species, there is a paucity of information regarding movement patterns of sea turtles that utilize nesting grounds in West Africa. We installed satellite tags on four female olive ridley sea turtles near the end of nesting season in Ghana. The purpose of this study was to determine their movement away from the nesting grounds. Two individuals remained in coastal waters within the Gulf of Guinea, whereas two individuals swam southerly and entered pelagic habitats of the eastern Atlantic Ocean. Even with the small sample size, these data suggest individuals disperse to different habitats near the end of nesting season.

The purpose of this study was to describe the dispersal pattern of adult female olive ridley sea turtles at the end of nesting season in Ghana, West Africa.

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Overview

This section explains attributes included in the original dataset. OBIS-SEAMAP restricts the attributes available to the public to date/time, lat/lon and species names/counts only. Should you need other attributes described here, you are encouraged to contact the data provider.

Attributes described below represent those in the original dataset provided by the provider.
Only minimum required attributes are visible and downloadable online. Other attributes may be obtained upon provider's permission.

Attributes in dataset

Attribute (table column)	Description
oid	Unique ID number (generated by OBIS-SEAMAP)
series	Tag ID
obs_date	Date of the location
obs_time	Time of the location
latitude	Latitude in decimal degrees
longitude	Longitude in decimal degrees
sp_obs	Species name recorded
sp_tsn	Taxonomic Serial Number added by OBIS-SEAMAP
obs_count	Number of animal. Always 1
geom	Geometry field added by OBIS-SEAMAP