Abstract
Marine turtles are both flagship species of conservation concern and indicators of ocean health. As highly migratory species, and despite substantial research effort focusing on nesting females and satellite tagging studies, we still know little about the trophic ecology and habitat use of immature stages and males. Consequently, marine turtle biologists began using stable isotope analyses in the last decade to elucidate various aspects of trophic ecology, including habitat use and trophic position. This has resulted in a burgeoning but largely disconnected literature of mostly single-species case studies. Here we comprehensively synthesize this body of work into a unified data repository, the MarTurtSI database. MarTurtSI contains stable isotope data from six of seven marine turtle species ranging from juveniles to adults, in different developmental, feeding, and breeding habitats across multiple ocean basins. MarTurtSI will be curated and updated with the aim of enabling continued comprehensive and global investigations into the trophic ecology of marine turtles especially in the face of climate change and other conservation challenges.
Highlights
Background & SummaryThere are seven extant species of marine turtles and all are considered by the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species to be threatened at some level: the loggerhead (Caretta caretta, endangered), green (Chelonia mydas, endangered), leatherback (Dermochelys coriacea, vulnerable), hawksbill (Eretmochelys imbricata, critically endangered), flatback (Natator depressus, data deficient), Kemp’s ridley (Lepidochelys kempii, critically endangered), and olive ridley (Lepidochelys olivacea, vulnerable)
A comprehensive database of stable isotope studies can provide insight into a variety of issues pertaining to marine turtles and ocean health more generally
Synthesis of diverse case studies enables a search for emergent patterns in trophic ecology across regions and species, which has bearing on general ecological and evolutionary understanding of species coexistence
Summary
There are seven extant species of marine turtles and all are considered by the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species (http://www.iucnredlist.org, Version 2018-1) to be threatened at some level: the loggerhead (Caretta caretta, endangered), green (Chelonia mydas, endangered), leatherback (Dermochelys coriacea, vulnerable), hawksbill (Eretmochelys imbricata, critically endangered), flatback (Natator depressus, data deficient), Kemp’s ridley (Lepidochelys kempii, critically endangered), and olive ridley (Lepidochelys olivacea, vulnerable). Trophic ecology (habitat use, feeding niche) is crucial to understanding the biology of marine turtles This is especially relevant because, like all highly migratory species, their management and conservation require both local and global efforts[1,2]. The resulting database synthesizes and summarizes the data in a form ready for researchers to use in broader analyses of the trophic ecology of marine turtles and other migratory marine species. It provides a template for data reporting by future stable isotope studies to facilitate novel data comparisons among studies.
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