Life Sciences Commons^™

A Review Of Marine Turtle Orientation And Artificial Lighting Impacts With Novel Results From Florida’S Gulf Coast, Andrea M. Fisher

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Artificial light (i.e. unnatural light emitting from a human-made source) is one of the most extensively distributed, and least managed, type of anthropogenic pollution. Due to the disproportionally high rates of urbanization in critical coastal ecosystems, species, like marine turtles that use beach habitat for nesting activities, are especially vulnerable. Marine turtles employ the use of multiple visual cues (e.g. wavelength, intensity, background illumination, and dark silhouettes) to conduct sea-finding behavior and different variations in cue usage exist across species and geographic location. During nesting and emergence activities, orientation can be interrupted and manipulated by artificial lighting resulting in lower …