When foraging, sea turtles presumably give little thought to the physics of ocean vortices. But scientists who study the reptiles want to know how mesoscale eddies, vortices 50–100 km in radius that transfer heat in the oceans, influence the distribution of turtle populations.

Now Peter Gaube at the University of Washington and colleagues have found that loggerhead sea turtles (Caretta caretta) modify their behavior to position themselves inside eddies. Colleagues from Uruguay and Brazil fixed satellite transmitters to juvenile turtles that journeyed to the confluence zone of the Brazil and Malvinas currents in the southwestern Atlantic Ocean. For five years the team tracked the turtles’ positions and those of untethered buoys known as drifters that are administered by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The researchers used satellite observations of sea-surface height to identify and track eddies.

The data showed that turtles avoided the peripheries of anticyclonic eddies....

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