Bubbles in the Bathtub

I recently had the opportunity to travel to the Cape Verde Islands as part of a research project I am involved in with the Marine Turtle Research Group (Brendan Godley, Lucy Hawkes and Annette Broderick), Luis Felipe Lopez Jurado from the Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, the team from Natura 2000, a Canary and Cape Verde Islands based NGO, and Matthew Godfrey of the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission.

The project is a study of the spatial ecology of sea turtles in the eastern Atlantic. To date this has included 10 adult female loggerhead turtles satellite tagged in 2004, and another three during 2005. The early results of this work were presented in an article in Current Biology.

The major finding presented in the paper is that the population of adult female loggerheads nesting on Boa Vista in the Cape Verde Islands appear to utilize two distinct foraging strategies, with smaller adults feeding pelagically and larger adults feeding neritically near the African coast.

To refine the distinction between these two groups we sought and received funding from the Large Pelagics Research Center competitive grants program. With this funding we are tagging a wide size range of adult female loggerheads this year and will also we tagging 10 leatherback turtles from Gabon in January.

If you are not familiar with the Cape Verde Islands, they are located 400-500 km off the coast of West Africa (see map below).

The Republic of Cape Verde is comprised of eight main islands and a number of smaller islands.

Natura 2000 has an office and field camp on the island of Boa Vista, the easternmost island in the archipelago. This is where our work has been carried out.

There is additional background info about Cape Verde's turtles in a WWF article entitled "Cape Verde: Tourism or Turtles?" that is mostly accurate.

Will turtles survive Cape Verde tourist invasion? - Afrol News