A biphasic navigational strategy in loggerhead sea turtles

Abstract

The homing journeys of nine loggerhead turtles translocated from their nesting beach to offshore release sites, were reconstructed through Argos and GPS telemetry while their water-related orientation was simultaneously recorded at high temporal resolution by multi-sensor data loggers featuring a three-axis magnetic sensor. All turtles managed to return to the nesting beach area, although with indirect routes encompassing an initial straight leg not precisely oriented towards home, and a successive homebound segment carried out along the coast. Logger data revealed that, after an initial period of disorientation, turtles were able to precisely maintain a consistent direction for several hours while moving in the open sea, even during night-time. Their water-related headings were in accordance with the orientation of the resulting route, showing little or no effect of current drift. This study reveals a biphasic homing strategy of displaced turtles involving an initial orientation weakly related to home and a successive shift to coastal navigation, which is in line with the modern conceptual framework of animal migratory navigation as deriving from sequential mechanisms acting at different spatial scales.