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Sea Turtle Research at UNC-Chapel Hill

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Kayla Goforth is a Ph.D. student in biology at the University of North Carolina. This spring, she plans to defend her dissertation on the development of foraging ground fidelity in sea turtles, the migration patterns of long-distance marine migrants, and the processes of geomagnetic imprinting and natal homing.

Kayla Goforth is a Ph.D. student in biology at the University of North Carolina. This spring, she plans to defend her dissertation on the development of foraging ground fidelity in sea turtles, the migration patterns of long-distance marine migrants, and the processes of geomagnetic imprinting and natal homing.

“I have always loved the ocean,” Goforth said. “My family traveled to the ocean for vacations when I was a kid and when I was about six, we saw a sea turtle nest excavation. We helped lead turtles from their nests to the ocean under red flashlights, and I thought it was the coolest thing. We were told that sea turtles return to the same nesting beaches they hatched on to nest as adults, and I wanted to know how they knew where to return to. This led me to study sea turtle navigation at UNC.”

“We test the sea turtle's ability to detect magnetic fields by putting them in a magnetic coil,” Goforth said. “So a magnetic coil is a system that allows us to reproduce Earth's magnetic fields.”

Goforth controls the magnetic coils through her laptop which dictates magnetic coil changes and records the sea turtles' responses. The program utilized by Goforth allows for magnetic fields across the globe to be mimicked in the magnetic coil and mapped on the computer.

Goforth’s research takes place within the Lohmann Lab at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a research team combining techniques from biology, physics, and engineering to research marine animals with specific focuses on behavior, sensory biology, and neuroscience.

The lab is run by Kenneth Lohmann, Ph.D. and Catherine Lohmann, Ph.D., whose research interests mirror Goforth’s, and the research team currently is led by five graduate students including Goforth.

“What we can do is we put the sea turtles in there [the magnetic coil system], and we'll expose them to magnetic fields from different locations across the globe,” Goforth said. “And we see how they respond to those fields. We know that sea turtles can detect two components of Earth's magnetic field. The first is the strength of the magnetic field. And the second is actually the angle that the magnetic field lines make with the surface of the earth. And so they can use those two components kind of like latitude and longitude, as a type of map. They have really specific feeding and breeding sites, and they return to the same locations year after year. So what I'm testing is whether they can learn a magnetic field and associate it with food. That's something that they might do in the wild as they're learning different feeding grounds.”

Goforth’s tests are some of the first to focus on the processes of geomagnetic imprinting and natal homing in relation to Earth’s magnetic field while using newly developed technologies.

“For a long time, we’ve known that they can navigate using the Earth’s magnetic field and they do it kind of with a magnetic map that allows them to identify locations,” Goforth said. “But a really big part of that idea of using a map is that they can learn magnetic fields or learn that specific magnetic coordinates are associated with something. And until now, we didn’t really have any actual evidence of that, but the initial results from this are suggesting that this is the case.”

Currently, scientists don't know how sea turtles sense the Earth’s magnetic field, making it difficult to understand how sea turtles are able to receive and interpret forces from the magnetic field.

“There are three major hypotheses for how they might do it,” Goforth said. “So, the first of these is called the biogenic magnetite hypothesis, and this suggests that there could be small particles of magnetite, which is basically a small mineral, a tiny magnet in their brains, and this magnet might be attached to a receptor, and it would stretch or bend that receptor when it experiences a change in Earth’s magnetic field. The second hypothesis is chemical magnetoreception and this suggests that there are complex chemical reactions that provide animals with a magnetic sense and those reactions are influenced by Earth’s magnetic field. And then, the third hypothesis is electromagnetic induction, and that is when an electrically conductive object, like a little circuit, if it moves through a magnetic field, a voltage is induced across it and the strength of that voltage depends on the strength of the magnetic field.”

Goforth’s research is vital to understanding more about animal navigation and could impact human technologies in the future.

“It’s important to research these topics now because there are still a lot of questions about how the magnetic sense of sea turtles works despite decades of research,” Goforth said. “New technologies have helped improve the ways in which we can ask questions about turtle navigation. I think it’s really incredible how animals can travel these vast distances without a map or a GPS and learning how animals navigate can help inform our own navigation tactics and technologies.”

After Goforth receives her Ph.D. in the spring, she plans to continue working in academia with hopes of one day running her own animal navigation lab in order to continue expanding our understanding of geomagnetic imprinting and natal homing.

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