Foraging and recruitment hotspot dynamics for the largest Atlantic loggerhead turtle rookery.

ABSTRACT: Determining patterns of migratory connectivity for highly-mobile, wide-ranging species, such as sea turtles, is challenging. Here, we combined satellite telemetry and stable isotope analysis to estimate foraging locations for 749 individual loggerheads nesting along the east central Florida (USA) coast, the largest rookery for the Northwest Atlantic population. We aggregated individual results by year, identified seven foraging hotspots and tracked these summaries to describe the dynamics of inter-annual contributions of these geographic areas to this rookery over a nine-year period. Using reproductive information for a subset of turtles (n = 513), we estimated hatchling yields associated with each hotspots. We found considerable inter-annual variability in the relative contribution of for

SUBMITTER: Ceriani SA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5715148 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature