BRISBANE: Researchers at Australia’s University of Queensland have put sea turtles in swimsuit to collect their feces for research.
Owen Coffee, a PhD student, said he was trying to collect fecal samples from six captured loggerhead sea turtles so he could analyze their diet with an aim toward identifying their foraging areas for conservation purposes.
Coffee, who is being assisted in his project by University of Queensland researcher Carmen da Silva, said his plan ran into a snag when he realized how difficult it was to retrieve the samples from the turtle tank at the Moreton Bay Research Station.
‘It was challenging to collect the entire fecal sample once it dispersed into the water,’ Coffee said. ‘So we developed a flexible funnel anchored to the shell, to fit over the turtle’s tail. But this was not a good answer either. Because the animals are so large, it was difficult to keep the devices in place.’
Dr Kathy Townsend, the station’s education coordinator, told Coffee about a previous project that involved creating flexible harnesses from ‘swimsuit material’ to help study the vision of sea turtle hatchlings.
Coffee said he modified some second-hand sun shirts to act as harnesses for the ‘giant nappy.’
