[Animals] This surprising discovery turns everything we knew about turtles upside down.

[FNX Magokiler]

Paddling a canoe down a murky Belizean river at dawn, Don McKnight and Jaren Serano heard the sound of the Central American river turtle, known locally as the hicatee.

A hydrophone placed in the water detected the movements of the reptiles, which had sonic transmitters attached to their shells.

The results surprised them: the turtles swam together through the river and, in some cases, they did not separate themselves even a meter from their peers. "It was like following a group of whales," says McKnight, an ecologist at LaTrobe University in Australia and the Turtle Ecology Laboratory in Belize.

These social turtles could dramatically change how we think of supposedly solitary animals, he says. It was previously thought that turtles gathered together when searching for the same resource, such as a sunny rock, but they generally did not interact with each other.

In the recent research, however, the turtles seemed to be looking for company. "It was very nice to see," says Serano, a master's student in the Department of Wildlife Ecology and Conservation at the University of Florida (United States).

What's more, the scientists' study, published this week in the journal Animal Behavior, may help conservationists protect this critically endangered species, which has declined throughout its range of Belize, Mexico and Guatemala. There are no solid po[CENSORED]tion estimates for this highly poached reptile, but its number could be as low as 10,000.

 

 

Hicatees are often sold on the black market for their meat, considered a delicacy in Central America.

"Belize remains the last bastion of the species, although if poaching continues for meat and eggs beyond domestic consumption, [it could become extinct] within the next 30 years," says Venetia S. Briggs-Gonzalez, an ecologist specializing in wildlife from the University of Florida that is not involved in the research.

Random or social?
McKnight and Serano were conducting other research on hicates in the spring of 2020 when they discovered that the animals move in unison.

"It's one of those random, silly ways that happens sometimes in science," McKnight says.

To find out if the turtles were actually socializing, the team found a section of the river that did not have any of the known variables that could attract turtles, such as logs, rocks or vegetation. By placing sonic transmitters on the shells of 19 juveniles of both sexes, the team was also able to rule out mating behavior.

 

https://www.nationalgeographic.es/animales/2023/09/sorprendente-descubrimiento-pone-patas-arriba-conocimientos-tortugas