Proceedings of the 17th Annual ISTS: tech for sea turtles

Nichols, WJ, JA Seminoff, C Lockwood and L Jimenez. Sea turtles, science and surfing: riding the Internet from the classroom to the field. Submitted paper, Proceedings of the 17th Annual Symposium on Sea Turtle Biology and Conservation, Orlando, Florida, March 1997. NOAA Technical Memorandum NMFS-SEFSC-415.

ABSTRACT

INTRODUCTION

On the 10th of August 1996 a loggerhead turtle, "Adelita", was equipped with a Telonics ST-3 satellite transmitter and released into the Pacific Ocean off of Baja California. Since that day, her position data have been made available to students and teachers via the Internet. The homepage of the Coastal Conservation Foundation has posted and updated her position weekly along with regular comments on her behavior. A link to the Turtle Trax homepage provides a map depicting her track across the Pacific Ocean. Hundreds of teachers and tens of thousands of school children have joined the project via the Internet. Many teachers have developed creative approaches to integrating this turtle into their curricula.

BIOLOGICAL CONTEXT IN BRIEF

The presence of juvenile loggerhead turtles along the coast of Baja California has long been an enigma: the closest known nesting beach for loggerheads is over 6,000 miles away in Japan. Recently biologists discovered that Baja California's turtles are genetically similar to those from Japan and Australia, thus supporting the theory of a trans-Pacific migration (Bowen et al., 1995). Only two flipper tag returns are known that support this theory, one from a turtle released in Japan and found in California (Uchida and Teruya, 1991) and another from a turtle released in Baja California and found in Japan (Resendiz et al., in press). In an attempt to shed some light on the trans-Pacific migration of loggerhead turtles we satellite tagged "Adelita". Since her release, "Adelita" has traveled more than 3,000 miles and recently crossed the International Date Line. The full results of this satellite telemetry project will be presented at next year's symposium.

TEACHING APPLICATIONS

By tracking this turtle, students not only learn about sea turtles but about marine conservation, oceanography, charting techniques, data analysis, algebra and a variety of other topics. This collaboration exposes students to the entire scientific process: asking questions, gathering information, developing hypotheses, analyzing data, and learning about uncertainty. Several schools have begun an interdisciplinary study of sea turtles which involves their science, art, geography, language arts, and math classes. This has resulted in a more complete appreciation of the marine environment. Other teachers are using this data to create semester-long Solution-Based Learning projects. Students from all over the planet interact with biologists and each other through e-mail, answering questions and sharing information. The results have been that uninvolved students have become motivated, students are excited about learning, many students stay after school to learn more about biology, and a positive, pro-nature virtual community has been created.