Sea Turtle Research Thrives at UF
An interview with zoology professor Karen Bjorndal, Director of the Archie Carr Center for Sea Turtle Research
This article was originally published in the May 1999 issue of CLASnotes.
Cn: What
is the mission of the Archie Carr Center for Sea Turtle Research?
KB: In our very active program we continue to emphasize research, conservation of sea turtles, and graduate student education. We also emphasize international work. One of our six graduate students is about to head off to Morocco, another to the Dominican Republic, and another to spend a year and a half in the Bahamas. We have an ongoing exchange program with Brazil and a very active exchange program with the University of the Azores, as well as extensive work going on in the Bahamas. Our major focus is research, but we try to design our research so that the results have important management implications.
The work of one of our graduate students, Blair Witherington, is a good example. Blair was very interested in how turtle hatchlings perceive light, so for his dissertation he undertook that study, but he also was able to develop some solutions to a very serious problem. When hatchlings emerge from the nest, they orient towards the horizon of greatest illumination. Under natural conditions that is always the ocean. A major problem wherever beachfront property has been developed is that the lighting behind the beaches disorients the hatchlings. In the case of Florida, every year thousands of hatchlings were being disoriented out to highway A1A and getting smashed by cars, being eaten by dogs, or dying of exhaustion or desiccation. Blair was able to discover that there is a single, monochromatic wavelength of light in the yellow zone which does not attract sea turtles. Essentially, they either do not perceive it or they actually avoid it.
Much beach lighting now has been switched over to utilize this type of low pressure sodium light. Florida Power and Light, for example, when replacing lamps behind sea turtle nesting beaches, uses the new lighting. I always like to use Blair's work as an example, because he discovered some wonderful things about the basic biology of light perception and response to behavioral cues in loggerhead turtles, but in addition, he had a tremendous impact on management options. While writing his dissertation, Blair received faxes, e-mail and telephone calls from as far away as Italy, Greece, and Malaysia. Internationally, people were very anxious to incorporate his results into their regulations for beachfront development. His results were the basis of many laws that have been established in sea turtle nesting countries throughout the world.
Cn: What's next for the Center?
KB: We have a real interest in doing more in-water research with sea turtles. The vast majority of work that has been done up to the last few years has been on nesting beaches, but that leaves about ninety-nine percent of their life cycle out in the water totally unexplored. It is much more difficult, more time-consuming, and more expensive to study turtles in the water, because when they leave their nesting beaches to go to their foraging grounds, they become widely dispersed and the encounter rate is much lower.
The Center has one of the earliest in-water studies. Actually, I started the project for my dissertation in the mid-70s in the southern Bahamas. Alan Bolten (Zoology) and I go back there every year and have been monitoring this long-term population. We have conducted research on growth rates, foraging ecology, movements, and have been making real progress there. But we need to do a lot more work.
Cn: What are the Center's future goals?
KB: We would like to obtain support for some Center-wide projects. One that we are particularly interested in is taking a broad approach to the epidemiology of a very serious disease in green turtles that has increased dramatically in the past ten to twenty years. The disease is called fibropapillomatosis and involves the growth of nonmalignant tumors that we believe are caused by a herpes virus. UF's Paul Klein (College of Medicine) and Elliott Jacobson (College of Veterinary Medicine) are the world's leading experts in this disease. They are trying to isolate the causative agent. They have made tremendous progress, but reptile herpes viruses are extremely difficult to culture. Meanwhile, the disease has continued to spread throughout the world. It used to be known only from green turtles. Now we know that it is also occurring in some of the other species of sea turtles, which is a real concern. We would like to take a very broad approach, working from many angles including nutrition, migration patterns, and genetics, to try to understand how it has become such a massive problem and how we can counteract it. Again, this would be a project that would have tremendous potential for learning about basic biology, but also tremendous management and conservation implications.
Cn: What do you see as the Center's biggest strengths?
KB: Although based here in Zoology, the Center is very broadly represented across campus. We have an executive committee that is composed of faculty from IFAS (Brian Bowen and Ray Carthy), the College of Medicine (Paul Klein), the College of Veterinary Medicine (Elliott Jacobson), and CLAS (Alan Bolten and myself). We have a very interactive program. We work at all scales from the molecular to the global, so that we are actively involved in questions of molecular genetics—with Brian Bowen taking the lead—and trans-oceanic migrations monitored with satellite telemetry, which is Alan Bolten's specialty. We are fortunate to have the greatest diversity and concentration of researchers studying sea turtle biology of any place in the world. It's also terrific that we all get along really well and enjoy working with each other—it's a real delight.
Grant-supported, the Archie Carr Center for Sea Turtle Research receives most of its funding from private foundations and federal agencies. Recent corporate donors include Disney, the Ted Turner Foundation and Royal Caribbean Cruise Line's Ocean Fund.
