Adaptation to Climate change in marine Turtles
Foraging sites and behavioural plasticity
Group outputs
- Summary of existing information on hawksbill foraging areas in the Caribbean.
- completion of WIDECAST foraging site atlas
- synthesis of published literature (known foraging sites; age/size classes of turtles present, their growth rates; habitat characteristics, e.g. prey types present; other relevant information to qualitatively characterize quality of foraging grounds)
- incorporate information on effects of climate change on coral reef habitat, as well as information on sponge-coral reef community dynamics (w/ implications for future climate change scenarios)
- Map of known hawksbill nesting sites, distributions, foraging sites, and bottom types to assess putative foraging sites relative to hawksbill stocks
- obtain data layer for bottom type (especially distribution of reef habitat)
- construct data layer for nesting sites (WIDECAST, SWOT)
- construct data layer for distributions, including foraging sites (see output 1)
- Biophysical model of hawksbill physiology with respect to water temperatures from literature-derived assumptions and new empirical data
- literature review of hawksbill physiology (or similar topics for related species)
- construct heuristic biophysical model to estimate physiological effects (e.g. metabolic rates, digestion, growth) of water temperature changes
- laboratory measurements of growth rates, digestion, and metabolic rates under different water temperature regimes
- empirical body temperature measurements of free-swimming hawksbills w/ concomitant water temperature measurements to record preferred water temps and resulting body temps to test model
- Determine dietary breadth using stable isotope analyses and diet compositions
- review of hawksbill dietary composition (Anne Meylan’s work) to create hypothetical baseline for isotope analyses and future dietary studies
- samples of putative prey types as well as hawksbill tissues for stable isotope analyses
