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Marine Turtle Newsletter 32:8, © 1985

Recovery of a Tagged Leatherback

Peter C. H. Pritchard
Florida Audubon Society, 1101 Audubon Way, Maitland, Florida 32751 USA

During the late 1960s and 1970s, I tagged between 2000 and 3000 nesting females of each of three turtle species (Dermochelys coriacea, Lepidochelys olivacea, Chelonia mydas) in Surinam and French Guiana. In all cases the turtles were tagged on a front flipper with Monel cattle-ear type tags. Considerable numbers of the last two species were subsequently caught by fishermen and shrimpers, but only a few leatherbacks were recaptured, mostly from the eastern seaboard of the United States.

Recoveries of all species were typically made within a year or two of tagging, which I attribute to poor retention of tags rather than to poor survival of the turtles themselves. I ceased tagging in the Guianas in 1973, and it is several years since a single tag has been returned. It was therefore of considerable surprise to me to receive a letter documenting the recovery of tag E6227, which I had placed on a nesting leatherback in French Guiana on 14 June 1970. The tag was taken from a dead turtle at Sandy Hook, New Jersey (USA) on 5 June 1984.

While it is not necessarily surprising to learn that a leatherback can survive for 14 years after reaching maturity, this has apparently not been documented before. What is indeed noteworthy is that the tag stayed on; the soft skin of Dermochelys probably retains tags less well than that of cheloniid sea turtles, and the tagging location I used (the soft skin in the trailing edge of a foreflipper not far from the axillary region) has since been shown to be inferior to either the distal foreflipper position or to the edge of the hindflipper.