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Published: 2012

Total Pages: 43

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Green sea turtles, Chelonia mydas, utilize coastal areas as foraging grounds for the majority of their lives. Human development of coastlines is increasing, but the effects of the urbanization of foraging grounds on green turtles are poorly understood. I used both manual and automated acoustic telemetry to determine the home ranges, movement behavior, and temporal patterns of site visitation of green turtles during 2009-2011 in San Diego Bay, California, a highly urbanized temperate foraging area. The home ranges of all tracked turtles were restricted to the southern portion of San Diego Bay, where eelgrass (Zostera marina) is abundant and where human activity is the lowest within the bay. Core activity areas coincided with eelgrass distribution or occurred adjacent to the warm water-effluent outfall of a waterfront power plant. Automated monitoring of sites throughout south San Diego Bay confirmed this finding, showing that green turtles most frequently visited the outfall of the power plant and areas known to contain eelgrass. This method also elucidated that turtle presence at the power plant was strongest during the winter and at night, whereas visitation to eelgrass areas was strongest during the spring and in the daytime. Turtle visitation to a high boat traffic shipping terminal was rare but occurred almost exclusively during the daytime, the period during which human activities in the area are also the highest. Manual tracking of green turtles similarly demonstrated that individuals ranged across larger portions of south San Diego Bay during the day, during which they exhibited high swimming speeds but highly non-linear movement. Turtle activity at night was primarily restricted to the power plant's effluent outfall channel and adjacent jetty. Nighttime movement was characterized by long periods of inactivity sporadically interrupted by brief, linear movements to new resting locations. Collectively, the results of this study paint a robust picture of the spatial, diel, and seasonal patterns of habitat use by green turtles in San Diego Bay. All data support the hypothesis that south San Diego Bay serves as important turtle habitat within the bay. Further, a combination of manual and automated acoustic telemetry enables a more complete understanding of turtle spatial ecology that would not have been possible with exclusive use of one technique. Future monitoring and modeling is required to document the potential effects of changing environmental conditions, including power plant closure, on green turtles resident to San Diego Bay. This study helps to assess the data gap of how turtles use urbanized foraging areas and changing coastal ecosystems, a currently novel scenario that will likely become commonplace in the face of increasing coastal development worldwide.