In 1995, a loggerhead turtle named Fisher washed ashore in North Carolina. He was too weak to swim b

In 1995, a loggerhead turtle named Fisher washed ashore in North Carolina. He was too weak to swim back out to sea solo, so researchers and various institutions cared for him. A decade later, Fisher had grown to a hearty 150 pounds. It was time for him to go.Researchers generally believe that baby loggerhead turtles born in the western Atlantic hitch a ride via the Gulf Stream to the eastern part of the sea, and hang out there for 10 to 15 years before making their way back to their hometown. It remains a mystery exactly why the turtles return, but Lucy Hawkes, an animal migration researcher and senior lecturer in ecology at University of Exeter, guesses that it’s an evolutionary tendency—the turtles sense that if they themselves were born in a certain place, it must be a safe place for them to have their own babies.When Fisher was released, Hawkes expected him to follow that path and allow the Gulf Stream to carry him across the sea. Instead, he bee-lined straight across the ocean towards the eastern Atlantic (as indicated by the purple line on the map above).“It was like he was playing catch-up in a race,” Hawkes says. “Think of it as a running race around the side of the field. When the race started, Fisher was too busy doing his shoes up or something, and then halfway through the race he thought, ‘Oh god, I better catch up with everybody else!’ and then ran straight across the field rather than around the side of it like everyone else did.”She had never seen this kind of path before. But Fisher’s case isn’t the only mystery of turtle migration. Hawkes is doing constant sleuthing for migration mysteries: “It’s like being a real-life detective of animals.” Read more about the stories locked within maps here.All map images reprinted from Where the Animals Go: Tracking Wildlife with Technology in 50 Maps and Graphics by James Cheshire and Oliver Uberti -- source link

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