F E A T U R E
R E S E A R C H P R O F I L E
HOW SEA TURTLES FIND SMALL, ISOLATED ISLANDS
DR VICTORIA JENKINS
Dr Victoria Jenkins is an Associate Professor in the School of Law. Her research interests lie in environmental law and she has spent more than 20 years publishing in this area. Dr Jenkins is particularly interested in how law and governance can be used to help address complex challenges such as the achievement of sustainable development – or the integration of our economic, social and environmental goals. In 2002, she published a paper entitled “Placing Sustainable Development at the Heart of Government in the UK: the role of law in the evolution of sustainable development as the central organising principle of government”. The paper suggested that “a legal duty in respect of sustainable development would act as a powerful educator of all actors in society and in focusing action in government in particular”. This idea has
been at the heart of new world-leading legislation in Wales - the Well-Being of Future Generations (Wales) Act 2015. In a recent book to mark the fifth anniversary of the Act ( #futuregen: Lessons from a Small Country ) the architect of that legislation, Jane Davidson, described the ‘goose bumps moment’ when she realised that this idea had actually been proposed by Dr Jenkins more than a decade before it was discussed by Welsh AMs. Dr Jenkins continues to work on cutting-edge research in the area of environmental law and now centres on the complex challenges of protecting the values of landscape and achieving sustainable land management. She has presented her work as part of the prestigious Brodies’ Environmental Law Lecture series at Edinburgh University and was awarded a Research Fellowship with the National Assembly for Wales
to consider possible approaches to UK Common Frameworks for environmental protection after Brexit. Landscape and sustainable land management are areas of multi-disciplinary research and Dr Jenkins seeks to collaborate with other researchers and external organisations in pursuing these research agendas. She is currently working on a paper considering the role of law in the protection of peatlands with Dr Jonathan Walker, Research Hub Co-ordinator at the Welsh Peatlands Sustainable Management Scheme. Peatlands are an important carbon store and essential to the ecosystem’s resilience of wetlands in Wales. Together Dr Jenkins and Dr Walker have identified numerous gaps in the current protection afforded to these essential natural resources in law and suggested a series of reforms in both the short and long term to address this.
In 1873, Charles Darwin marvelled at the ability of sea turtles to find isolated islands where they nest. How they do it has been revealed by a pioneering study by scientists from Swansea University with colleagues from Deakin University and the University of Pisa. The team equipped 33 green sea turtles with satellite tags and recorded unique tracks of green turtles migrating long distances in the Indian Ocean to small oceanic islands. The study provides some of the best evidence to date that migrating sea turtles have an ability to redirect in the open ocean. Seven turtles travelled only a few tens of kilometres to foraging sites on the Great Chagos Bank, six travelled over 4,000km to mainland Africa, one to Madagascar, while another two turtles ventured north to the Maldives. Most of the species tracked migrated westward to distant foraging sites in the Western Indian Ocean that were associated with small islands.
It shows that the turtles can travel several hundred kilometres off the direct routes to their goal before reorienting, often in the open ocean. The study also showed that turtles frequently struggled to find small islands, overshooting, and/or searching for the island in the final stages of migration. These satellite tracking results support the suggestion, from previous laboratory work, that turtles use a crude true navigation system in the open ocean, possibly using the world’s geomagnetic field. Swansea University’s Dr Nicole Esteban, a co-author in the study said: “We were surprised that green turtles sometimes overshot their ultimate destination by several hundred kilometres and then searched the ocean for their target. Our research shows evidence that turtles have a crude map sense with open ocean reorientation.”
12 | Momentum: Research News from Swansea University
Momentum: Research News from Swansea University | 13
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