Use dead turtles to save live turtles

Researchers at the Virginia Institute of Marine Sciences, USA, are using the corpse of the Brassman turtle to study to protect their fellow humans.

According to IFL Science, the team cleaned up the organs of the dead Loggerhead Sea Turtle and filled Styrofoam plasticizer into the abdominal cavity so they floated on the water, adapting to the floating state of a New dead turtles with their bodies swollen due to gas from decaying tissues.

The body of the turtle is used to study the effects of wind and ocean currents.(Photo: D. Malmquist / VIMS).

By attaching a satellite tracking device (GPS) to a turtle's body and dropping them into the water at Chesapeake Bay, the team hopes to map out the drift model of the corpse, determine the effect of wind and ocean currents to the movement process. This model will allow them to look back to where the turtles are stranded, the location and the cause of their death.

Scientists published the study at the 36th Annual Conference on Ecology and Marine Turtle Conservation of the International Sea Turtle Association, which took place in early March in Lima, Peru."If our model accurately simulates the impact of wind and ocean currents on dead turtles , we can reverse it from the location of the strand to where the turtle died. By knowing the location, we can find the cause easier, " explained Bianca Santos researcher.

For example, if a large number of turtles die in fisheries development, this may indicate that they are trapped in the fishing net, leading to improved requirements for the fishing gear to be safer for turtles.

According to co-author David Kaplan, the reuse of dead turtle seems strange, but it works well."If successful, two Frankenturtle turtles can help reduce the number of dead turtles in the future ," Kaplan said.