Japan's coastal regions are known to be major nesting sites for loggerhead sea turtles, but nobody knows for sure where baby turtles go after they hatch and how they eventually return to the archipelago to nest.
To clear up the mystery, researchers in Japan and the United States have jointly embarked on the first project to track the migration of young sea turtles across the Pacific, using a satellite and state-of-the-art transmitters attached to the turtles' shells.
The Nagoya Public Aquarium and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Organization released 24 loggerhead turtles, aged between 1 and 4, into the Pacific in April and November from a ferry sailing off the Boso Peninsula in Chiba Prefecture, so that the turtles could swim along the "Kuroshio," or black current.
Each turtle is fitted with a U.S.-made transmitter measuring 5 cm by 13 cm and weighing up to 200 grams. Data on the turtle's location are sent to the satellite every time it rises up to the surface.