Congratulations to our second Boyd Lyon Sea Turtle Fund scholarship recipient, Melania C. Lopez-Castro!! Melania is currently a Ph.D student at the University of Florida Department of Biology and is studying the early life cycle of Atlantic green sea turtles, specifically where these turtles go and what to do during their "lost years" of early development.  Here is a description of Melania's project:

Project summary

Sea turtles have complex life cycles and although we have learned much about their reproductive and neritic foraging grounds, no one has solved the mystery of the "lost years" of sea turtles -- where sea turtles spend their first years of life (Reich et al. 2007, Arthur et al. 2008) -- except for loggerheads, Caretta caretta (Carr 1986, Bjorndal et al. 2000, Bolten 2003b). Locating these areas is an important goal in sea turtle conservation because we cannot protect these turtles, or know what threats they face, unless we know where they are.

Recently, members of the Archie Carr Center for Sea Turtle Research made a great advance in the "lost years" puzzle by determining that "lost year" green turtles inhabit open ocean habitats and feed as carnivores in the North Atlantic (Reich et al. 2007), but we still don't know their geographic location. With my research I will build on this advance to determine the location and number of these oceanic habitats by analyzing the regional variability of trace elements in the scute of Atlantic green turtles and determine connectivity patterns between oceanic and coastal foraging areas. I will collect samples of young green turtles at neritic foraging grounds in Florida, the Bahamas, Nicaragua and Brazil. Because scute is an inert tissue once it is deposited (similar to human fingernails), I can evaluate a history of where turtles have been by analyzing the scute layers deposited over previous years and with that, I can determine if young green turtles from these neritic foraging grounds come from the same oceanic area or are using different oceanic areas.

Thanks to the work done with loggerheads in the Atlantic, I will be able to compare the elemental signature of scutes of loggerheads from different oceanic foraging grounds (Northeast Atlantic, Azores, Brazil) and compare them with the elemental signatures of green turtles which might give us an idea of where in the ocean green turtles spend their "lost years" and solve this mystery.

Some photos of Melania in action: