Green Sea Turtle

Chelonia mydas

Reptile

Transcript:

Today on Animal Fact Files we’re discussing green sea turtles. These reptiles get their common name from the color of their flesh. Green sea turtles have green fat! This color comes from their diet. As adults, the majority of a green sea turtle’s diet consists of seagrass and algae making them the only herbivorous adult sea turtles! They have serrated jaws to help facilitate this diet. On the other hand, or… well… flipper, green sea turtle juveniles eat a more meaty diet to encourage their growth.

It takes about thirty years for a green sea turtle to reach reproductive maturity. Adults migrate, sometimes thousands of miles, to return to the beach where they were born, and mate. This is done in open water. Females only do this every few years, spending anywhere from two to eight years before breeding again. Males are opportunistic and mate more frequently, taking as many partners as they are able.

The sexes can be told apart because males are smaller, have a concave lower shell, and a longer tail than females. They also don't leave the water. Females go ashore to lay their eggs, sometimes in large numbers! They dig a nest in the sand and then leave immediately after. They’ll repeat this process several times at approximately two week intervals during the breeding season. Each nest contains around 100 eggs with larger females laying more eggs. It's believed fewer than one in every 1,000 green sea turtles make it to adulthood. The babies hatch about two months later and spend their first few decades riding oceanic currents between feeding grounds.

Green sea turtles compete with loggerheads as the largest hard shelled turtles, but can’t quite compete with the largest living turtle - the leatherback. Green sea turtles can reach about four feet (122cm) long and over 400 pounds (181kg) in weight. They can be told apart from other sea turtles by looking at their head and shell. Green sea turtle shells have five central scutes and four side scutes per side. Their head has a single pair of scales in front of their eyes - most other sea turtles have two pairs of these prefrontal scales!

The greatest threats to green sea turtles are anthropogenic, or human-related. Run-ins with boats, accidental capture in fishing nets, collection of eggs, and the climate crisis all contribute to the decline of green sea turtles globally. As of this recording, they're listed as endangered. Natural predators to green sea turtles include sharks, crocodiles, foxes, jackals, crabs, sea birds, and more. If they can avoid these threats, green sea turtles can live to be seventy years old or older!

These turtles live in temperate and tropical marine waters around the world. When away from breeding beaches, green turtles live in the open ocean as well as coastal feeding grounds where they take food from the seafloor. They can reach top swimming speeds of just over 20 miles per hour (32km/h) but prefer to cruise at about a quarter of that speed.

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