Loggerhead sea turtle
Caretta caretta
— Where the name comes from
The Italian tartaruga comes from the late Latin tartaruchus, from the Greek tartaroûkhos, “dweller in Tartarus”: to the medieval Christian imagination an animal that lives in mud was a creature of the underworld. Caretta is an adaptation of the French caret, the sailors’ name for sea turtles.
— Facts
- Group
- Reptiles · Reptilia
- Order
- Turtles and tortoises
- Habitat
- Open sea and seagrass meadows; nests on sandy beaches
- Range
- All temperate seas, the Mediterranean included
- Size
- 80–110 cm of shell, 80–200 kg
- Diet
- Carnivore — jellyfish, molluscs, crustaceans
- Lifespan
- 60–70 years
— Characteristics
- 01
Nests on the same beach where it hatched, decades later.
- 02
Hatchlings find the sea by heading for the brighter horizon.
- 03
In Italy it lays in Sicily, Calabria, Puglia and, more and more, on the Tyrrhenian coast.
— What sets it apart
On hatching, the young turtle imprints the exact magnetic signature of its beach — the tilt and strength of the Earth’s field at that spot. It spends twenty years crossing the ocean and then returns to lay within a few kilometres of where it was born, by reading that coordinate. It is a home address written in the magnetic field of the planet, memorised by an animal weighing twenty grams.
