{"id":458,"date":"2009-05-30T02:27:03","date_gmt":"2009-05-30T06:27:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scott.sherrillmix.com\/blog\/?p=458"},"modified":"2009-05-30T02:27:03","modified_gmt":"2009-05-30T06:27:03","slug":"great-turtle-race","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/scott.sherrillmix.com\/blog\/biologist\/great-turtle-race\/","title":{"rendered":"Great Turtle Race"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m a bit late on this one (I don&#8217;t know how I managed to miss it since I had to put the data together) but National Geographic and Conservation International had a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.conservation.org\/great_turtle_race\/pages\/main.aspx\">Great Turtle Race<\/a> with a bunch of leatherback turtles tagged by my old adviser. They took data from turtle tracked from Nova Scotia to South America and had a big two-week event watching which turtle reached the Caribbean first. They have a pretty <a href=\"http:\/\/animals.nationalgeographic.com\/greatturtlerace-map\/\">cool animation<\/a> of the satellite tracking (although of course not quite as good as <a href=\"http:\/\/scott.sherrillmix.com\/blog\/biologist\/when-do-leatherback-turtles-migrate-south\/\">mine<\/a>) and some cute <a href=\"http:\/\/kidsblogs.nationalgeographic.com\/greenscene\/turtles.html\">leatherback artwork<\/a> (complete with leathery back instead of shell, although why are they green?).<\/p>\r\n<a href=\"http:\/\/animals.nationalgeographic.com\/greatturtlerace-map\/\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/res\/images\/greatTurtleRace.png\" alt=\"Flash animation of Great Turtle Race\" class=\"center\"\/><\/a>\r\n<a href=\"http:\/\/kids.nationalgeographic.com\/Games\/ActionGames\/Great-turtle-race\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/res\/images\/greatTurtleRace_game.png\" alt=\"Leatherback turtle game\" class=\"right\"\/><\/a>\r\n<p>That site also has the first <a href=\"http:\/\/kids.nationalgeographic.com\/Games\/ActionGames\/Great-turtle-race\">leatherback game<\/a> I&#8217;ve ever seen. The artist did a really good job since the view is pretty much identical to the view we get from a shoulder mounted turtleCam. Unfortunately, the game turtle handles like a tank which really doesn&#8217;t do justice to the maneuvering ability of leatherbacks. They&#8217;re huge animals but in the water they&#8217;re really quite graceful and they can turn on a dime (as I quickly found out when we were trying to catch them).<\/p>\r\n<a href=\"http:\/\/kidsblogs.nationalgeographic.com\/greenscene\/turtles.html\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/res\/images\/greatTurtleRace_backspacer.png\" alt=\"Backspacer leatherback by Chris Rooney\" class=\"left\"\/><\/a>\r\n<p>Anyway, it looks like the turtle named Backspacer (it&#8217;s weird to see all the interesting names since we always call the turtles by their tag ID number), sponsored by Pearl Jam, yes that <a href=\"http:\/\/www.pearljam.com\/news\/great-turtle-race-update-backspacer-wins-loomstate-responds-pearl-jam-audience-favorite-challen\">Pearl Jam<\/a>, won the race.  Turtle Cali won the diving portion of the race and received an <a href=\"http:\/\/deepseanews.com\/2009\/05\/world-champion-leatherback-wins-iron-turtle-award\/\">Iron Turtle Award<\/a>.  Here&#8217;s a nice <a href=\"http:\/\/blog.conservation.org\/2009\/04\/where-are-they-now-the-true-stories-of-each-racing-turtle\/\">post-race summary<\/a> and also Olympic swimmer (and turtle coach) <a href=\"http:\/\/blog.conservation.org\/2009\/04\/coach-jason-lezak-wraps-up-the-race\/\">Jason Lezak&#8217;s take on it<\/a>.  It&#8217;s great to see so much public interest in leatherback turtle tracking and National Geographic and Conservation International did a great job promoting and running the event.<\/p>\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I&#8217;m a bit late on this one (I don&#8217;t know how I managed to miss it since I had to put the data together) but National Geographic and Conservation International had a Great Turtle Race with a bunch of leatherback turtles tagged by my old adviser. They took data from turtle tracked from Nova Scotia [&hellip;]","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,16],"tags":[479,711,481,275,480],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/scott.sherrillmix.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/458"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/scott.sherrillmix.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/scott.sherrillmix.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/scott.sherrillmix.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/scott.sherrillmix.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=458"}],"version-history":[{"count":28,"href":"http:\/\/scott.sherrillmix.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/458\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":486,"href":"http:\/\/scott.sherrillmix.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/458\/revisions\/486"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/scott.sherrillmix.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=458"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/scott.sherrillmix.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=458"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/scott.sherrillmix.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=458"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}