14Ingham’s W RLD
THE TALE of the turtle caught twice in a net revealed this week just how far some sea creatures travel. The female loggerhead turtle called Thunderbird was caught by fishermen in the Med, satellite tagged and freed. She led researchers on an odyssey through the Straits of Gibraltar, out into the wild Atlantic and down Africa’s west coast to Senegal.
Sadly her last signal was stationary, on land and near a fishing port. Thunderbird had probably been caught in a net too far.
But I’m indebted to reader Hamish Smillie, from Kent, who has steered me to ocearch.org, a website tracking turtles, sharks and seals around the world.
The interactive map shows a few loggerheads from near Venice swimming up and down the Adriatic, enjoying the warm waters off Dalmatia – something many of us would love to do right now.
Another loggerhead, Thetis, was tagged off Greece and spent a year feeding between Sicily and Tunisia before testing waters off Sardinia.
Out in the Atlantic, Lampiao, an 8ft long tiger shark, was tagged off Brazil in 2014 and then took three years to work his way across the Atlantic to the Ivory Coast.
A 5ft mako shark called Rizzilient was caught off New
York’s Long Island in 2013, spent Christmas near the Mid-Atlantic Ridge and by March 2014 was residing near Porto.
A near neighbour, Machaca, an 8ft blue shark, was tagged off Massachusetts in September 2016 and over the next four months hunted south of Newfoundland, doubled back to the Carolinas, then dashed over to Portugal.
Fans of the movie Jaws will be pleased to know that the shark we love to fear – the great white – is out there. Most seem quite happy working their way up and down America’s east coast, from Canada to the Caribbean.
But not Nukumi. This adult, all 17ft and 1.7 tons of her, was tagged near Nova Scotia last October. She worked her way down America’s eastern seaboard, right past where Jaws was set, and then struck out east across the Atlantic. The last beep came in April when she was south of the Azores – on our side of theAtlantic.
Perhaps she’s planning to defy Covid restrictions and pay the warming waters of the Southwest a visit.You’ve been warned.
EVERY year the world throws away 1.3 billion tons of food which rots and pumps out huge volumes of greenhouse gases.
A solution beckons, says Japan’s Society of Materials Science. Tokyo University has made building materials three times stronger than concrete... from Chinese cabbage leaves.
EXTINCTION can be beaten. In the 1980s there were just a few pairs of red kites left in Wales. But in the past 24 years numbers have soared 18,695 per cent thanks to a reintroduction scheme, says the British Trust for Ornithology.
These majestic birds are everywhere – as they were in Shakespeare’s day.