Sea turtles are fascinating reptiles that capture people's imagination around the world. These ancient creatures have been journeying Earth's oceans for over 100 million years. By understanding sea turtle biology, we can help protect them so future generations enjoy their beauty and grace. With that in mind, let’s learn more about these amazing creatures.
Types of Sea Turtles and Where They Live
Chelonioidea is the sea turtle scientific name. There are seven different sea turtle species out there. They include:
- Green
- Loggerhead
- Hawksbill
- Leatherback
- Kemp's Ridley
- Olive Ridley
- Flatback
Each has unique features and habitat preferences, adapting over millions of years to ocean conditions and food availability. You can also see differences in sea turtle shell, sea turtle size, and even sea turtle eyes.
They inhabit tropical, subtropical, and temperate seas across the world, except polar oceans. Sea turtles migrate incredible distances between feeding and nesting grounds relying on magnetic fields to navigate open water.
Sea Turtle Bodies and Special Adjustments
When learning about sea turtles, you should be familiar with sea turtle anatomy. Sea turtles evolved streamlined bodies and large, powerful front flippers making them graceful, efficient swimmers and deep divers. Unlike land turtles, sea turtles cannot retract their head and limbs into their shells for protection.
Over time bony plates fused into a smooth hydrodynamic shell enabling underwater movement. However, sea turtle teeth, sea turtle throat, and sea turtle skeleton among different species changed very little.
Leatherbacks lack the external scutes (plates) possessed by other species, having instead leathery, oil-saturated skin with prominent ridges for streamlining. Their long front flippers make them the deepest divers, allowing impressive journeys to over 3,000 feet chasing jellyfish.
How Does the Sea Turtle Diet Look Like?
Sea turtle diets reflect available food sources in different marine ecosystems. Green sea turtles only eat plants and algae, allowing them to inhabit tropical nearshore reefs and seagrass meadows. Loggerhead, Hawksbill and Olive Ridley Sea turtles are omnivores, feeding on both plant and animal material like crustaceans, mollusks and jellyfish depending on habitat.
The mighty Leatherback's diet consists almost exclusively of jellyfish and helps control jellyfish blooms. Understanding what sea turtles eat, and threats to their food, highlights the need to conserve their foraging and nesting territories.
Where and How Sea Turtles Breed
Mating occurs near nesting beaches and female sea turtles return to the exact beach of their birth to lay eggs; a phenomenon called natal homing. Female turtles drag their heavy bodies, nearly collapsing with exhaustion, onto sandy beaches at night to avoid extreme heat and predators. Using their rear flippers, they excavate a nest chamber, then deposit around 100 rubbery-shelled eggs before carefully covering the nest and returning to sea.
The eggs incubate underground for approximately two months before hatching. Nest temperature determines the baby turtle's sex during the middle third of incubation, a critical period for conservation.
Threats Sea Turtles Face
Climate change, marine pollution, overfishing, habitat destruction from coastal development, and entanglement in fishing nets threaten sea turtles globally both on land and in the oceans. With so many pressures including hunting adults and poaching eggs for food and products, many turtle species now face extinction. These threats are negatively impacting sea turtle lifespan.
Leatherbacks and Hawksbills in particular suffer severe population declines. Only international cooperation and a network of reserves, both nesting beaches and marine zones, provide turtles sanctuary for feeding and breeding during their transoceanic migrations.
Importance of Protecting Sea Turtles and Their Habitats
It is true that sea turtles could survive the ice age. However, they are facing many other threats as of now. Hence, we as humans should provide our support to these endangered species. This is where we should understand the biology of sea turtles. With that, we can take appropriate measures to ensure their protection for future generations.