40 Fun Facts About Loggerhead Sea Turtle

A nesting loggerhead appears to weep on the beach because glands behind its eyes are doing which job?

Shedding excess salt is the glands' real job, because a loggerhead takes in seawater as it feeds. Out of the water, the briny runoff simply looks like crying.

What decides whether a loggerhead hatchling is male or female during the two months its egg spends buried?

Nest temperature decides it: warmer sand produces females and cooler sand males. Beaches that ran unusually hot for three years hatched broods that were 87 to 99 percent female.

Adelita the loggerhead became the first animal tracked by satellite across an ocean when she swam to which country?

Japan was Adelita's destination in 1996, a swim of about 14,500 km. It was evidence that loggerheads feeding off Mexico go back to breed on shores a whole ocean away.

A loggerhead may swallow a floating plastic bag because it resembles which drifting prey eaten on open-sea crossings?

Jellyfish are a staple for loggerheads crossing open water, and a drifting bag looks much the same. Swallowed plastic can block the gut and leave a turtle to starve.

Unlike a box turtle or a tortoise, what is a loggerhead sea turtle unable to do with its shell?

Pull its head inside is beyond a loggerhead, and its flippers stay out too. The shell still works as armor, and an adult's sheer bulk deters all but the largest ocean hunters.

Which cue do loggerhead hatchlings follow to find the sea at night, a habit that strands thousands on built-up coasts?

The brightest horizon normally lies over the water, lit by moon and stars. Streetlights and porch lamps outshine that glow, luring hatchlings inland to dry out or be eaten.

Where does a female loggerhead sea turtle usually go to lay eggs, often decades after last seeing the place?

Her own birth beach, or one close by, is where a loggerhead nests, even after decades at sea. Some swim thousands of miles from their feeding grounds to reach it.

Which feat can a wintering loggerhead keep up for seven hours or more at a stretch in cold seas?

Hold its breath underwater is the feat: in the coldest months a loggerhead comes up for only about seven minutes between dives. Few air-breathing sea animals stay down as long.

Which mammal, booming in American suburbs, is the most destructive raider of loggerhead nests in the Southeast?

Raccoon raids have wiped out nearly every clutch laid in a season on some Florida beaches. Wire mesh fixed over the nests now keeps most of the eggs out of reach.

Which ocean predators have left bite wounds on up to 40 percent of nesting female loggerheads around the world?

Sharks are the suspects: tiger, bull and great white sharks are among the few hunters big enough to tackle an adult. Eggs and hatchlings face a far longer list, from ants to gulls.

Which color is the slightly heart-shaped top shell of an adult loggerhead sea turtle?

Reddish-brown is the adult's color, set off by a pale yellow underside. Hatchlings start out mostly dark brown and gain the rusty tones as they grow.

Which crusty hitchhikers commonly stud the shell of a loggerhead sea turtle?

Barnacles are among more than a hundred kinds of animal found living on loggerheads. The extra drag does the turtle no known good, though a duller shell may hide it better.

Once a hatchling has reached the sea, which loggerhead sea turtles will ever deliberately crawl ashore again?

Only egg-laying females come back, for an hour or two per nest. A male that reaches the surf as a hatchling may live out the rest of his decades-long life at sea.

Which body parts does a nesting loggerhead use as scoops to dig the deep chamber that will hold the eggs?

Hind flippers do the digging, once the turtle has scraped out a shallow body pit. She then buries the clutch, covers the pit with sand and heads back to the waves.

Which party decoration does NOAA ask people never to release outdoors because loggerheads swallow the remains at sea?

Balloons that drift out over the ocean look like food to a turtle, and their strings can entangle it. Fishing line, tar and plastic fragments turn up in loggerhead stomachs too.

The loggerhead is named for a huge head whose jaw muscles crush whelks and which other hard-shelled sea snail?

Conch and whelk shells give way to jaws that make the loggerhead a specialist in armored prey. No other sea turtle has a longer list of known foods.

Which US state, home to Hilton Head Island, made the loggerhead its official state reptile in 1988?

South Carolina chose a turtle that nests along its own shore. On Hilton Head, a town rule says beachfront lights must be shielded or switched off by 10 p.m. to protect it.

Which invisible guide do loggerheads sense to hold a course across thousands of miles of open ocean?

Earth's magnetic field gives loggerheads both a compass and a map. Hatchlings swimming in a pool turned to new headings when coils copied the field of distant parts of the Atlantic.

Which feature, much longer and thicker in males, lets observers tell adult male and female loggerheads apart?

Tail size is the clearest clue, and males also carry longer claws. Before adulthood the sexes look the same from outside, so researchers need lab tests to sort juveniles.

Young loggerheads shelter for years in floating mats of which brown seaweed, the namesake of an Atlantic sea?

Sargassum mats give young turtles both cover and a floating larder of fish eggs and tiny drifting animals. Even ants and beetles blown out to sea end up on the menu.

Which fishing boats must fit turtle excluder devices, escape hatches that let a netted loggerhead swim free?

Shrimp trawlers drag fine-meshed nets along the bottom, where a trapped turtle can drown. Since 1989 the US has refused shrimp imports from fleets that fish in ways that harm sea turtles.

Which animal, brought to Australia by British settlers, once ate up to 95 percent of loggerhead clutches on one coast?

Red fox culls in the 1980s and 1990s eased the damage. The species had been released in the 19th century, and by the 1970s it was emptying nests along part of the eastern seaboard.

Roughly how many eggs go into each nest that a loggerhead sea turtle digs, some two weeks apart, in a season?

About 100 eggs fill each nest, and a female may dig three to five nests in one season. After that effort she waits two or three years before breeding again.

What do loggerhead hatchlings do for roughly their first 20 hours after crawling into the surf?

Swim nonstop offshore: the marathon takes them far out to sea. The crawl beforehand is costly too, drying away up to a fifth of a hatchling's body mass.

Which so-called living fossil, little changed in 250 million years, is a regular item on the loggerhead's menu?

Horseshoe crab is on the list beside whelks and other shellfish from the seabed. Loggerheads switch to this bottom-feeding diet after years of eating whatever floats past.

Which fishing term covers loggerhead sea turtles hooked or netted by accident, their greatest ongoing threat worldwide?

Bycatch on longlines and in gillnets can drown a turtle or leave it with a swallowed hook. Gillnet bans and seasonal closures are among the fixes now in use.

Which warm Atlantic current are young loggerheads thought to ride from the American coast to mid-ocean nurseries?

Gulf Stream waters are thought to carry the young out to mid-ocean, where drifting seaweed hides them from predators. It forms one side of a current loop whose mild waters suit a growing turtle.

Yoshi the loggerhead swam 37,000 km to Australia after 20 years in an aquarium in which African city?

Cape Town's Two Oceans Aquarium took Yoshi in as a 2 kg juvenile in 1997 and released her at 183 kg. She then averaged about 48 km a day for more than two years.

Which term do biologists use for the pale-yellow underside of a loggerhead's shell, also called the lower shell?

Plastron is the belly plate, joined to the domed upper shell by three pairs of bridging plates. Its own plates come in six named pairs, among them the humeral, pectoral and abdominal.

Which Arabian country, home to Masirah Island, hosts one of the world's largest loggerhead nesting populations?

Oman is the loggerhead's biggest nesting ground in the Indian Ocean, yet trend studies show its population is declining.

Which Greek island bans night flights at its airport to protect loggerheads nesting on its beaches?

Zakynthos shelters one of the Mediterranean's busiest loggerhead nesting grounds in Laganas Bay. Females come ashore to lay there after dark each summer, so aircraft stay grounded overnight.

Which Atlantic island group off West Africa is the only major loggerhead nesting ground on the ocean's eastern side?

Cape Verde's globally important rookery supplied the turtles that scientists used to assemble the loggerhead genome.

Which naturalist gave the loggerhead its first scientific name, Testudo caretta, long before today's Caretta caretta?

Carl Linnaeus named it in 1758, in the book that launched modern animal naming. Dozens of rival names followed before zoologists settled on Caretta caretta.

Which pioneering sea turtle biologist is honored in the name of a Florida refuge on prime loggerhead nesting beaches?

Archie Carr worked out that young sea turtles spend their early years hidden in floating seaweed. The refuge bearing his name shelters about a quarter of all US sea turtle nesting.

Loggerhead Key is the largest island in which remote Florida national park?

Dry Tortugas owes its own name to turtles: Ponce de León caught 160 of them there in 1513 and called the islands the Tortugas. Park rangers monitor nesting on Loggerhead Key.

A campaign backed by Prince Philip stopped a hotel on Iztuzu Beach, a loggerhead nesting site in which country?

Turkey gave the beach protected status in 1988, a year after work began on an 1,800-bed resort. The campaign was led by June Haimoff, an Englishwoman locals called Kaptan June.

Which landmark US law, signed by Richard Nixon, has protected the loggerhead since it was listed in 1978?

Endangered Species Act protection began with a single worldwide listing as threatened. In 2011 regulators split the loggerhead into nine populations and rated five of them endangered.

What happens to a loggerhead when seawater chills to about 10°C, a danger that seasonal migration helps it avoid?

It floats, cold-stunned, once the sea gets that cold, having turned sluggish a few degrees earlier. Younger loggerheads are hardier and last until the water dips below 9°C.

Which hook shape have longline fleets adopted, along with fish bait, to catch fewer loggerheads by accident?

Circle hooks in large sizes are now required in several US longline fisheries. Together with net changes and reduced fishing effort, they have cut accidental turtle catches in some fleets.

Fibropapillomatosis, a herpes-type viral disease of loggerheads, covers the turtles in which kind of growth?

Tumors can form inside the body as well as on the skin, and those on the eyes cause permanent blindness. They also disrupt the everyday behaviors a turtle depends on.