Apollo and Jack heading south

By Dean Bagley, UCF Marine Turtle Research Group

Since our last update, Jack is continuing his migration south, and I believe Apollo is beginning his migration.

When we left off last week, Jack was just north of the St. Lucie Inlet. He has continued south down the peninsula, and is currently approaching Key Largo. He left a beautiful track down the coast, with not much deviation. He is still migrating. You will see that his last location is over the reef. Hopefully he will keep swimming by and find an area with no reef to settle down. I’m sure that reef areas are responsible for losing tags earlier than if a turtle settles in a non-reef area, because they can either damage the antenna or just keep knocking it against reef structure until it falls off. His last location was just north of North Key Largo, and approximately 12 km from shore.

For most of his tracked time, Apollo has remained up at the Cape. He made just one foray south, to just past Sebastian Inlet and back. You can see on the map where he left the Cape on June 4, 2019, and meandered south for six days, turning around on June 10 in Indian River County, and returned to the Cape just two days later on June 11. Other than that one week, he has remained in the vicinity of the Cape. Then on June 26, he turned around when he was as far north as he’d ever been, spent the better part of three days in one spot, before beginning his trip south. He was just south of Port Canaveral at 4:02 on the 29th, and his last hit for this update was at 8:09 p.m. on June 29, 2019, about 2.5 km south of SR 520.

Because both turtles are migrating, I’ll try to send another update later this week.