Cape Verde (Cabo Verde) 2005: Loggerhead Turtles

A project of Marine Turtle Research Group in conjunction with the partners and sponsors detailed below.

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Introduction

Continuing from last years immensely successful project at Boavista, the team will be deploying 5 transmitters this summer at Boavista. Last years results showed that turtles from Cape Verde actually use one of 2 different strategies of migration after nesting. This year we return to investigate these strategies, specifically to determine whether large adult turtles, discovered last year to feed off the coast of Guinea and Sierra Leone, employ a different strategy from smaller adult turtles that feed in the open ocean. The turtles will again be given special Creole names by local students. Creole is the local dialect. The nesting population of Cape Verde has been identified as a priority for conservation along the West Coast of Africa and more information needs to be collected on its natural history, including migratory pathways and foraging areas. This study will investigate these post nesting migratory pathways and foraging grounds and describe diving and depth utilisation patterns.

Project Partners

This satellite tracking project is a collaboration among the Cape Verde Instituto Nacional Desenvolvimento Das Pescas (Sonia Merino, Vito Melo), the Marine Turtle Research Group (Brendan Godley, Annette Broderick, Lucy Hawkes), SEATURTLE.ORG (Michael Coyne, Matthew Godfrey) and the Universidad Las Palmas, Canary Islands (Luis Felipe Lopez Jurado, Nuria Varo, Pedro Lopez-Suarez, Daniel Cejudo). The ongoing turtle monitoring and conservation project is being supported by "Hydrocarpo", an Interreg IIIB project (UE) ; a Canarian and Cape Verde Government

initiative implemented by the Cape Verde Instituto Nacional Desenvolvimento Las Pescas and the Instituto Canario de Ciencias Marinas , Canary islands (Spain).

Noting the regional importance of this work, WWF-WARPO are working with project partners to help the project disseminate its findings to maximum effect.

Project Sponsors

This project was funded by generous grants from the British Chelonia Group, the Natural Environmental Research Council, and SEATURTLE.org.

• The presentation of data here does not constitute publication. All data remain copyright of the project partners. Maps or data on this website may not be used or referenced without explicit written consent.
• For more information please visit the project website.
• If you have questions or would like to request the use of maps or data for this project please contact bgodley@seaturtle.org.

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