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Bermuda Juvenile Green Turtle Tracking

In 2011, annual satellite tagging juvenile green turtles as part of the Bermuda Turtle Project began. Through STC’s Sea Turtle Migration-Tracking Education Program, the public is invited to watch along as we learn more about these amazing animals.
Bermuda Turtle Project

Most scientific studies of sea turtles are conducted on nesting beaches where females come ashore to lay their eggs. However, the Bermuda Turtle Project is an in-water project in which turtles are captured in their marine environment in order to learn more about their complex life histories. The Bermuda Turtle Project has assembled important data sets on size and maturity status, growth rates, sex ratios, residency, site fidelity, genetic diversity, and movement patterns in immature green turtles in Bermuda waters. We have assembled similar, but much smaller, data sets for Bermuda hawksbills. Our findings show that Bermuda serves as a year-round habitat for immature green turtles and hawksbills, providing a ‘developmental’ feeding ground for nesting beach populations that are located mostly in the Caribbean, but may exist as far away as Cyprus in the Mediterranean.

This project provides the unique opportunity to follow immature green turtles as they depart a developmental habitat. Over 3,500 immature green turtles have been captured on the seagrass flats with nets and tagged in Bermuda since the project began in 1968. Green turtles in Bermuda range in size from approximately 25 to 75 centimeters in shell length, with no recent records of adult turtles. Long-distance tag returns indicate travel south to feeding grounds in the Caribbean Sea. Starting in 2011, GPS satellite tracking units have been used to study the fine-scale movements of presumed resident turtles to learn more about how they use the habitat, what their daily and seasonal behaviors are.

The Bermuda Turtle Project is a collaborative effort of the Bermuda Aquarium, Museum and Zoo and the Sea Turtle Conservancy. Anne Meylan (Florida Marine Research Institute – Florida Fish & Wildlife Conservation Commission) and Peter Meylan (Eckerd College) serve as the project’s Scientific Directors. For more information on the Bermuda Turtle Project, check out the Bermuda Turtle Project section of STC’s website.