COSTA / Telemetry
After the year 1995, telemetry studies were carried out in the Azores to better understand the movements of juvenile loggerheads and to investigate the environmental drivers that are important for these animals. With the help of satellite transmitters attached to the carapace of the turtles, researchers were able to discover and describe the affinity of loggerheads for seamounts which are very numerous in the region (Santos et al. 2007). Recent studies also found that loggerhead turtles were associated with oceanographic features such as “eddies” (Chambault et al. 2019), as previously demonstrated in the Pacific.
In 2020, the COSTA project included a new methodology in its telemetry studies with the goal of investigating the behavior of marine turtles in the water column. This was made possible using Daily Diary Loggers (DDL), in which have built-in accelerometers, magnetometers and tri-axial gyroscopes, in combination with Time-Depth Recorders (TDR). allowing to identify small scale behaviors and to correlate observed diving patterns with known types of behavior, create 3D maps and measure the trajectory of the animal.