Growth Rates of Wild Immature Green Turtles in the Galapagos Islands, Ecuador

Abstract

Despite a deluge of publications on growth in immature captive green turtles, particularly hatchlings (e.g., Harrisson, 1955; Caldwell, 1962; Lebeau and Lebrun, 1976; Garnett, 1980), or growth after release of captive-reared green turtles (e.g., Kowarsky and Capelle, 1979; Ehrhardt and Witham, 1992), growth rates of wild green turtles under completely natural conditions have received surprisingly little attention. The earliest results are those of Schmidt (1916) for wild green turtles in the U.S. Virgin Islands (then the Danish West Indies). Since then, data on growth rates of immature green turtles in the wild have been published for Bermuda (Burnett-Herkes et al., 1984), Australia (Limpus and Walter, 1980), Hawaii (Balazs, 1982), Florida (Mendonca, 1981; Wershoven and Wershoven, 1992), Bahamas (Bjorndal and Bolten, 1988), the U.S. Virgin Islands (Boulon and Frazer, 1990), and Puerto Rico (Collazo et al., 1992). This paper provides data on the growth rates of wild immature green turtles tagged in the Galapagos Islands between 1975 and 1980.