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A little movement orientated to the geomagnetic field makes a big difference in strong flows

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Abstract

Whilst a range of animals have been shown to respond behaviourally to components of the Earth’s magnetic field, evidence of the value of this sensory perception for small animals advected by strong flows (wind/ocean currents) is equivocal. We added geomagnetic directional swimming behaviour for North Atlantic loggerhead turtle hatchlings (Caretta caretta) into a high-resolution (1/4°) global general circulation ocean model to simulate 2,925-year-long hatchling trajectories comprising 355,875 locations. A little directional swimming (1–3 h per day) had a major impact on trajectories; simulated hatchlings travelled further south into warmer water. As a result, thermal elevation of hatchling metabolic rates was estimated to be between 63.3 and 114.5% after 220 days. We show that even small animals in strong flows can benefit from geomagnetic orientation and thus the potential implications of directional swimming for other taxa may be broad.

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Acknowledgments

RS was funded through a PhD studentship awarded to GCH from the Natural Environment Research Council. Additional support was provided by the Climate Change Consortium for Wales (C3W). We are grateful to Jeff Blundell for assistance in the local implementation of the ARIANE trajectory software, to Christoph Weidemann for help with R code and to Andrew Coward and Beverly de Cuevas (NOC) for making model output from NEMO freely available. We thank Bruno Blanke and Nicolas Grima for freely providing ARIANE to the oceanographic community. NEMO is a state-of-the-art, portable modelling framework developed by a consortium of European institutions, namely the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), Paris, the UK Met Office (UKMO), Mercator-Ocean, and the UK National Environment Research Council (NERC). The latter development is funded under the NERC “Oceans 2025” programme.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Biosciences, Swansea Moving Animal Research Team, Swansea University, Swansea, SA2 8PP, UK

    Rebecca Scott & Graeme C. Hays

  2. School of Ocean and Earth Science, National Oceanography Centre, Southampton, University of Southampton, Southampton, SO14 3ZH, UK

    Robert Marsh

Authors
  1. Rebecca Scott
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  2. Robert Marsh
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  3. Graeme C. Hays
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Correspondence to Graeme C. Hays.

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Communicated by J. D. R. Houghton.

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Scott, R., Marsh, R. & Hays, G.C. A little movement orientated to the geomagnetic field makes a big difference in strong flows. Mar Biol 159, 481–488 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00227-011-1825-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00227-011-1825-1

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