seaturtle.org :
MTN :
ARCHIVES :
Sign In
Marine Turtle Newsletter 135:18-19, © 2012
From Suriname to Ceará. Green Turtle Found Dead on the Coast of Ceará, Brazil
Eduardo H.S.M. Lima1, Marie Louise Felix2, Alberto Klefasz3, Maria Thereza D. Melo1 & Matthew H. Godfrey4
1Fundação Pró-TAMAR, Acesso Projeto TAMAR 151, Almofala - CE, 62592-000 Brazil (E-mail: eduardo.lima@tamar.org.br);
2WWF Guianas, Henck Arronstraat 63, Suite E, Paramaribo, Suriname (E -mail: mlfelix@wwf.sr);
3CETAS – Centro de Triagem de Animais Silvestres – IBAMA/CE, Brazil;
4NC Wildlife Resources Commission, 1507 Ann St. Beaufort, NC 28516 USA (E-mail: mgodfrey@seaturtle.org)
On 16 May 2012, an adult female green turtle (Chelonia mydas) was found dead on the beach at -3.8253°S, -38.4002°W in Ceará, Brazil; it had a Monel flipper tag on its left front flipper (SUR0000032). This individual had been tagged during the evening of 16 May 2010 on Matapica Beach, Suriname (5.9945 °N, -54.9845 °W), after she was observed nesting. The distance between where she was tagged and where she was found stranded was nearly 2,000 km. At the time of tagging, her curved carapace length (CCL) measured 103 cm. When found in Ceará, the CCL was 111 cm. When discovered, the carcass was moderately decomposed, and this may have affected the carapace length measurements to a small degree.
The coastal waters off of the state of Ceará have long been documented as a foraging area for juvenile and adult (27 - 132 cm CCL) green turtles (Ferreira 1968; Lima et al. 2003; Marcovaldi et al. 2001). Observations of flipper tag returns in Ceará have shown that many of the green turtles found in this area come from a variety of foraging and nesting populations, including Suriname and the Guianas (Pritchard 1973; Schulz 1975), Ascension Island (Carr et al. 1964), Costa Rica and Puerto Rico (Lima et al. 2008). Genetic analyses of juvenile and adult turtles found incidentally captured or stranded in Ceará demonstrate that the Surinam nesting population is a major source rookery for that green turtle foraging area (Bowen et al. 1992; Naro-Maciel et al. 2007). However, this is the first tag recovery in Brazil of an adult green turtle from Suriname in several decades, although the tagging effort in Suriname has not been consistent over this time frame.
This tag recovery is concordant with complementary datasets derived from flipper tags and genetic mixed stock analyses (Lima et al. 2008; Naro-Maciel et al. 2007; Prichard 1973). Data from a satellite tracking study of green turtles in Ceará showed that juveniles and adults (41 - 116 cm CCL) generally remained near the Ceará coast, with a few individuals moving several hundred kilometers away from the initial release point. However, the average time that the turtles were tracked was 70 days (Godley et al. 2003). Thus, there is a lack of information on the movements of adult and juvenile green turtles in this region over longer time and geographic scales. We recommend that more satellite tags be deployed on juvenile and adult green turtles foraging in Ceará to fully describe their movements. We also recommend that flipper tags continue to be placed on both adult and juvenile green turtles in the wider Central Western Atlantic region as a cost-effective means to elucidate turtle movements between different habitats.
Acknowledgements. Data collection was authorized by the Chico Mendes Institute for Biodiversity Conservation (ICMBio) under license number 14122, issued by the Biodiversity Authorization and Information System (SISBIO). We thank CETAS – Centro de Triagem de Animais Silvestres/IBAMA/CE, NUFAU – Núcleo de Fauna/IBAMA/CE. Projeto TAMAR, a conservation program of the Brazilian Ministry of the Environment, which is affiliated with ICMBio, and co-managed by Fundação Pró-TAMAR.
BOWEN, B.W., A.B. MEYLAN, J.P. ROSS, C.J. LIMPUS, G.H. BALAZS & J.C. AVISE. 1992. Global population structure and natural history of the green turtle (Chelonia mydas) in terms of matriarchal phylogeny. Evolution 46: 865-880.
CARR, A. 1964. Transoceanic migrations of the green turtle. BioScience 14: 49-52.
FERREIRA, M.M. 1968. Sobre a alimentação da aruanã, Chelonia mydas Linneaus, ao longo da costa do estado do Ceará. Arquivos da Estação Biologia Marinha da Universidade Federal do Ceará 8: 83-86.
GODLEY, B.J., E. LIMA, S. AKESSON, A.C. BRODERICK, F. GLEN, M.H. GODFREY, P. LUSCHI & G.C. HAYS. 2003. Movement patterns of green turtles in Brazilian coastal waters described by satellite tracking and flipper tagging. Marine Ecology Progress Series 253: 279-288.
LIMA, E.H.S.M., C.J. LAGUEUX, P.C.R. BARATA & M.Â. MARCOVALDI. 2003. Second record of a green turtle (Chelonia mydas) tagged in Brazil and captured in Nicaragua. Marine Turtle Newsletter 101:27.
LIMA, E.H.S.M., M.T.D. MELO, M.M. SEVERO & P.C.R. BARATA. 2008. Green turtle tag recovery further links northern Brazil to the Caribbean region. Marine Turtle Newsletter 119:14-15.
MARCOVALDI, M.Â., B.G. GALLO, H.M.S. LIMA & M.H. GODFREY. 2001. Nem tudo que cai na rede é peixe: an environmental education initiative to reduce mortality of marine turtles caught in artisanal fishing nets in Brazil. In: E.M. Borgese, A. Chricop & M. McConnell (Eds.). Ocean Yearbook 15. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. pp. 246-256.
NARO-MACIEL, E., J.H. BECKER, E.H.S.M. LIMA, M.A. MARCOVALDI & R. DESALLE. 2007. Testing dispersal hypotheses in foraging green sea turtles (Chelonia mydas) of Brazil. Journal of Heredity 98: 29-39.
PRITCHARD, P.C.H. 1973. International migrations of South American sea turtles (Cheloniidae and Dermochelidae). Animal Behaviour 21: 18-27.