Here’s How Sea Turtles Remember Their Natal Beach

Hatchling sea turtles are emerging from their nests, scrambling down the beach and swimming off into the open sea where they eat and develop.

Countless years and miles after, mature turtles then go back to where they were born to mate and produce their own offspring.

This is an incredible directional endeavor that has perhaps progressed to provide hatchlings with the best opportunity to live and survive.

If turtles are successfully hatched on a beach, then there's a good chance that this particular beach will still be an appropriate nesting place when it returns.

(Photo : Bruna Prado/Getty Images)
Turtles are also focusing on slight differences in magnetic fields. Specifically, they are learning their natal beach’s magnetic signature.

Variety of Senses

To manage such a skill, turtles call on a variety of senses. As they swim through open seas, as earlier mentioned, there is proof that these reptiles can navigate using the Sun's position.

The sense of smell is essential, too. In examining aquariums, juvenile loggerhead sea turtles are found to have reacted to the "smell of mud piped into the air by swimming with their heads out of the water." However, they ignored such other smells, proposing they recognized the distinct scent of land.

Perhaps, the most essential and definitely most mysterious sense of turtles is what the scientists call "magnetoreception," the ability to detect the magnetic field of the Earth.

It remains unknown precisely how turtles are doing it, but hatchlings are following inherent or natural magnetic compass during their initial swims offshore.

Slight Differences in Magnetic Fields

Turtles are also focusing on slight differences in magnetic fields. For instance, around Florida, loggerhead turtles are learning their natal beach's magnetic signature.

Meanwhile, green sea turtles tracked using satellite tags in the Indian Ocean were recently presented to follow a fairly unpolished magnetic map.

Frequently, turtles overpassed their destination island by hundreds of miles, although they were able to reset their route or quest until they reach their target, probably through the use of combined senses.

As earlier mentioned, exactly how animals, specifically sea turtles, are perceiving magnetic fields remains unknown. There are various reasons why identifying magnetoreceptors has proven to be extraordinarily difficult.

One of them is that magnetic fields are different from other sensory stimuli in that they are passing unrestricted using biological tissue.

Receptors for various senses like sight and smell need to make contact with the outside environment, although magnetoreceptors might possibly be positioned almost anywhere inside the body of an animal.

What the 'Magnetic Field' Does to Animals

Essentially, the magnetic field of Earth, also called the geomagnetic field, offers animals different types of information that can be utilized for different navigation purposes, as maps and compasses.

Other than sea turtles, salmons and other animals are using their magnetic cues to navigate while they are in their long-distance navigation.

In the sea turtles' case, information from the magnetic map can be used to either guide turtles as they go to a particular area or help them assess its estimated location along a "transoceanic migratory route."

In effect, according to experts in the field, these animals have a "low-resolution biological equivalent of global positioning system," although one that's based on "geomagnetic information" and not on signals from a satellite.

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