Loggerheads coming through!

ALGECIRAS (Source: National Geographic & EuropaSur / Photo by Brian J. Skerry for NG) A six-year study by the Centro de Gestión del Medio Marino (Cegma, Centre for Marine Studies) in Algeciras reveals that it can take a year for a loggerhead turtle (caretta caretta in Latin, tortuga boba in Spanish, boba meaning stupid = in the US you get called loggerhead if you're stupid) to travel on the marine currents from its birthplace in the Gulf of Mexico, cross the Atlantic and into the Mediterranean, if they're small. It takes lesss if they're larger. Remembering that the Gulf of Mexico was hit by BP's massive oil spill,>the team of vets and specialists at Cegma are ready to take care of any turtles that might be affected by the spill, or have been injured on their way - or have eaten plastics that they confuse with their staple diet of jellyfish.

The study, carried out in cooperation with the University of Barcelona and the Canariy Islands Institute of Marine Sciences, concluded that 80% of the loggerheads that arrive in the Mediterranena, crosssing through the Straits of Gibraltar, come from the Gulf of Mexico. Other loggerheads come from the coasts of Brazil, Colombia, Panama, Mexico, Southeast Europe and West Africa. These facts were determined by analysing four thousand loggerheads and setting up a library of genetic markers that reveal the genes according to where the turtle was spawned.
 

The Strait of Gibraltar is described in the study as an asymetric barrier in the exchange of turtless between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. This means that loggerheads have been found from two origins: the Med (Greece, Turkey, Lybia) and the Atlantic (USA, Mexico, Cape Verde). Specimens from both sides of the strait have also been found.

At Cegma they are also ready to receive new residents for their holding tanks: sixty baby loggerheads were born recently at the beaches of Cabo de Gata, where a programme of reintroduction, lead by the Junta de Andalucía, was started recently.

 

(Prospero Note: I can hear you ask, "Why's he putting this up?" And the answer is that I spent a week every year for almost eleven years making sure the babies got across the I-95 highway in Florida - before they got crushed by traffic and never made it to the sea where they belonged.)