Where do baby sea turtles go? — salon.com

After baby loggerhead turtles hatch, they wait until dark and then dart from their sandy nests to the open ocean. A decade or so later they return to spend their teenage years near those same beaches. What the turtles do and where they go in those juvenile years has been a mystery for decades. Marine biologists call the period the “lost years.” Following the tiny turtles has proved to be difficult. Researchers tried attaching bulky radio tags, but the devices impeded the turtles’ ability to move. The size of the tags shrank over time, yet the batteries remained stubbornly large. Then Kate Mansfield, a marine biologist at the University of Central Florida, got the idea to go solar.

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