Department of Physics, Chemistry and Biology (IFM)

The experiments were conducted at Oceanografic, Valencia (Spain), in the ARCA del Mar facility where wild sea turtles are being taking cared off after being found injured on the coast of Valencia and being brought at Oceanografic. They usually stay there for few weeks, depending on the seriousness of their injuries before being released into the wild.

For this project, 11 individuals have been tested and compared.

Twice a week, they were presented with either 5 clams or 5 green shore crabs, 1 every 5 minutes. Behavioural data were collected with the help of 2 data loggers (one on the head, the other one on the carapace) and a camera was also used to record the turtle behaviour from above the water.

The first idea was to compare their feeding behaviour when they're eating a crab and when they're eating a jellyfish. However, and despite jellyfish being part of their diet, only 2 jellyfish out of 13 have been eaten by the jellyfish. Because the jellyfish species we gave them were translucid (Moon jellyfish) we decided to color them by feeding them with plankton, which gave an orange color to the animals so the turtles might see them better, but I didn't observe any more interest from the turtles. Because the turtles were present in ARCA del Mar for a limited period of time, I decided to switch from the jellyfish for clams in the hope to collect more data