Where's Luna? Conservancy to track loggerhead sea turtle released off Collier

Just off Goodland, in the feeding grounds of the Ten Thousand Islands, Luna the loggerhead sea turtle dipped beneath the ocean surface Thursday afternoon and into the wild.

The 2-year-old turtle served as an ambassador for the Conservancy of Southwest Florida for most of her life, welcoming visitors and school field trips to the Conservancy's discovery center. The Conservancy, which has been using loggerheads to help educate its visitors for about 20 years, releases the turtles once they are large enough to survive in the Gulf.

But little is known about what happens to them or where they go once released. They have always been tagged on their flippers, but so far only one of the Conservancy's ambassador turtles has been found again, swimming in the Florida Keys 28 days after it was released.

For the first time on one of the released turtles, researchers have attached a radio transmitter to Luna's shell to get a better idea of how she fares and whether she will stay in the Ten Thousand Islands or migrate to the Keys or into the open Gulf.

"It's always interesting to deploy these transmitters; there are always surprises," Conservancy environmental research manager Jeff Schmid said. "We know the Ten Thousand Islands are an important area for feeding. The thought is if they're released in a foraging area they should have what they need to live. That's the big question, will Luna stay or move?"

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The Conservancy plans to create a page online that will keep real-time updates of where Luna travels.

It's unclear how long the tracking device will work.

The transmitter was attached to the back of the turtle's shell, which isn't close to done growing yet. Eventually, the shell will expand to the point that the transmitter falls off, or Luna will wedge herself into a rocky bottom and damage the radio or knock it loose, Schmid said.

He said he would be happy if they get up to six months or a little more with the transmitter.

"Normally we only have a release point and end point," Schmid said. "We don’t know what the turtle was doing in between and that’s what we hope to learn."

Loggerheads are federally listed as a threatened species, a step from endangered. The long-lived turtles don't reach sexual maturity until they are about 35 years old. The females lay their eggs under the sand along beaches throughout southern Florida. When the young turtles hatch they follow the light of the stars and night sky to the open water, where they spend most of their lives.

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As development has continued to encroach upon the beaches, the young turtles will often follow city lights inland, rather than the stars, and perish.

Luna was plucked out of a turtle nest on Sanibel Island and was hatched at Gumbo Limbo Park in Boca Raton as part of a gender research study with Florida Atlantic University. 

The sex of the turtles is determined by the temperature of the sand during a key period of the incubation. FAU's research has shown that the sand has been warming over the past 12 years along the east coast, causing the vast majority of turtles hatched there to be female.

But research out of the Rookery Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve in Collier County, has shown that the sand in Southwest Florida has remained cooler, producing slightly more male turtles than female, Schmid said.

"That shows our beaches here in Southwest Florida are that much more important because here we're putting out males into the breeding population," he said.

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