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Marine Turtle Newsletter 110:9a, © 2005
Length-width and length-weight relationships of Caretta caretta from Italy, Mediterranean Sea
Paolo Casale1, Daniela Freggi2, Roberto Basso3, Roberto Argano4
1via Antonio Calderara 29, I-00125 Roma, Italy, (E-mail: paolo.casale@tiscalinet.it), 2Sea Turtle Rescue Centre WWF Italia, CP 92010 Lampedusa, Italy, 3Museo Civico Storia Naturale del Po, via Roma 4, Ostellato, Italy, 4 Dipartimento di Biologia Animale e dell’Uomo,
Università “La Sapienza”, I-00185 Roma, Italy
For a variety of reasons, there may be the need to convert sea turtle width and weight to length and vice versa, for instance when the carapace has deformities or mutilations, or just to understand whether or not an individual is in the normal range. Here we provide relationships between curved carapace length notch to tip (CCLn-t), curved carapace width, and weight based on live loggerhead turtles
(Caretta caretta) encountered in different circumstances in the Italian waters/coasts in the period 1981-2000. For each 5-cm length class (minimum 31 specimens), we calculated the values including 95% of the sample as mean ± 1.96 SD. The relationship between carapace length and width (n=2242; size class range: 20-85 cm CCLn-t) is described (r2 = 0.9728) by the equation:y (width) = 0.9229x + 0.3105 with approximately 95% of the population lying between y=0.8626x - 1.1921 (r2 = 0.9982) and y = 0.9526x + 4.0582 (r2 0.9962) respectively, regression equations of low and high 95% limits of 5-cm length classes. The equations for the relationship between carapace length and weight (n=1668; size class range: 20-80 cm CCLn- are respectively: y(weight) =0.0002x2.8984 (r2 = 0.9546); y = 0.00003x3.2391 (r2 = 0.8971) and y = 0.0007x2.6365 (r2 = 0.9888). Given possible differences between populations, these relationships are not necessarily valid in areas outside the Mediterranean.