Turtle barnacle researcher tracking them down

The key to protecting critically endangered turtles could lie in their barnacles.
While some people think barnacles growing on turtles is bad for them, Griffith University researcher Ryan Pearson said they could actually help protect the turtles, and shift conservation to where it’s needed most.
“The International Union for Conservation of Nature has recently added sea turtle sub-populations to their Red List assessments, allowing us to look into the level of effort versus conservation need in each sub-population for the first time.” he said.
In a new paper published in the journal Marine Ecology Progress Series, the Australian Rivers Institute member has shown that conservation focused studies of isotopes – chemical signals which can identify what an animal has fed on or where it is living – in sea turtles have almost all been done in the lowest priority places around the world. That is, the sub-populations that are not considered threatened.
“This means

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