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The loggerhead turtles are less than two inches (five centimeters) long when they emerge from underground nests on the eastern Florida coasts. They crawl straight from their shells and plunge into the Gulf Stream, then into the North Atlantic gyre, a circular current that wraps clockwise around the Sargasso Sea.
The North Atlantic gyre takes the turtles from their Florida nests and east across the Atlantic, past the Azores, south past the Canary and Cape Verde Islands, and finally back toward their birthplace on North American shores.
To determine whether the turtles inherited a migratory map, Lohmann and his colleagues collected baby loggerheads straight from their nests and studied their behavior while exposing them to different magnetic fields.
Each of the 79 loggerheads in the study was outfitted with a blue nylon-Lycra "bathing suit" that was tethered to a tracking system. The turtles were then placed in a shallow circular water tank. Surrounding the tank was a huge electric coil that generated magnetic fields.
Lohmann's team exposed the turtles to magnetic fields that simulated three key locations along the migratory route—northern Florida, the northeastern gyre near Portugal, and the southern gyre—and recorded the direction in which each animal swam.
"We found that turtles followed their migratory route," said Lohmann.
When the turtles were exposed to a magnetic field that mimics the one that occurs near Portugal, for example, the turtles paddled south. In the ocean, the movement in that direction would keep the turtles in warm, nutrient-rich circuit and away from cold waters.
