When it comes to leatherback sea turtles, size does matter.
A new research study conducted by UW-Madison, with help from Florida Atlantic University, found that chunkier turtles are better swimmers than their slimmer counterparts. The plumper turtles outperformed while swimming due to lost power in the slimmer turtles’ strokes.
Several previous attempts to study animals swimming in water failed due to difficulty recreating the correct drag and thrust, but students at FAU accidentally came across the answer when a program they were using to study young leatherback sea turtles’ energy use produced the ability to better analyze how they swam.
It was after this that Warren Porter, lead researcher on the team studying the turtles at UW-Madison, connected with the FAU students to utilize the technology to study animals in water, which allows the team to calculate how much energy is being used and in turn how much food an animal needs to eat to survive.
“Now that we have [models] for both marine and terrestrial environments, we can answer those types of questions and get back to the big mass extinctions and get some insights into how did animals live before and after those extinctions,” Porter said in a university statement. “Why were the animals that survived able to survive?”
Thanks to the help of the chunky little turtles, the new models will be able to uncover even more insights into animals species and how they survive, according to the statement.
