We're not planning on going fully live until after the New Year, but it seems appropriate to post this tonight. It's about 7:00 PM CST on Christmas Eve and, according to NORAD, Santa has just made a stop at Tarrafal, Cape Verde in the Atlantic off of West Africa. Exciting stuff, and I'm sure kids these days are as wired as mine used to be. Of course, back in the day, we didn't have all the high tech support, just the local weatherman saying that Santa (actually, usually Rudolph - red nose, you know) had been spotted headed toward town and it was time to get your butt in bed if you wanted to get anything for Christmas.But, for the grown-up biologists in the crowd who already have a pretty good idea what time Ole Saint Nick will be arriving, there's a similar watch going on right now. For the last couple of weeks, the Marine Turtle Research Group has been tracking two leatherback sea turtles, Dermochelys coriacea, who are also currently off the coast of West Africa. The leatherbacks, named Darwinia and Noelle, are traveling a circuitous route off the coast of Gabon.
Leatherbacks are the largest of the living sea turtles, reaching lengths in excess of nine feet and weighing nearly a ton. They're also the deepest-diving of the sea turtles, with documented dives to almost 4,000 feet.
If you get tired of tracking the jolly little guy with his eight tiny reindeer (Rangifer tarandus), then you might check out the big turtles.
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