Is the Research Worth the Cost?

This week I stumbled upon a very interesting story that was recently posted on sciencedaily, but also published Methods in Ecology and Evolution.  The name of the paper that was published was Calculating the Ecological of Animal-Borne Instruments on Aquatic Organisms.  The paper was hit home on a couple different fronts because it was just today in class that we were talking about sea turtles and their travels across the ocean.  Well, in this paper they made fiberglass casts of sea turtles to simulate drag from the object that is on the organism.  This was also interesting to me at the point that in working with the LCRI, I got to tag and track smallmouth and largemouth bass throughout Lake Champlain.  I never really considered the idea this could be very detrimental to the fish.  Below I have attached a picture of what a fiberglass cast looks like that was used in the experiment's process.  


This paper really struck me as an interesting idea to research because scientist are always investigating what humans do to animals or how they act in nature, well now it's time to see how scientist themselves affect animals.  After saying that I had to dig a little bit deeper than what was only posted on sciencedaily, and I found some very interesting information.  

These are just a couple examples of tags that are used and how they can be attached to fish.

The most striking information that they found from their research is that these animals can have their migratory routes and ability to survive and reproduce negatively affected.  These researchers may be doing work to help, but in actuality hurt the endangered species even more.  These researchers formatted an equation, C_D = F_D/0·5 ρU²A, the breakdown of this formula can be found on the link above attached to the title of the article.  The images they had attached to their paper were very interesting, one showed the migratory patterns of the turtles throughout the world and another showed the permits for tagging turtles per year. 

 

After reading the results and discussion portions of this paper, they stated that they had found that a turtle with a mount on it had its drag increased by 43%, which correlated to increase it's energy intake 143%.  This evidence does in fact show what I was worried about which these animals that are under extreme stresses of migration, are now becoming dependent on consuming for food which in return could increase predatory risks.  The believe by these turtles having to use the extra fats that they have stored, the reproduction success could also be negatively affected.



I hope that we can find ways to help these turtles, that doesn't hurt their populations anymore than they are struggling already.  I don't know about all of you reading, but I one day would like to take my family so we can all swim with these beautiful giants.