Abstract:
Sea turtles emerged around 110 million years ago. At their peak there were four families of them, each with several dozen species. Today, only two families survive. Amanda Southwood, a sea turtle researcher at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, received a North Carolina Fishery Resource Grant in 2006 to study sea turtle movements. The turtles studied are those that have become entangled in fishing nets in the lower Cape Fear River then released. Without satellite and high-frequency tags to track the turtles, there is no way to know if the released animal survived or not.