Other than the time they are in their nest and females when they come out of the ocean to nest, sea turtles spend their entire lives in the ocean. Their shells are built to live in this environment; they are mostly flat, hydrodynamic and streamlined so they are able to swim very fast through the water.

Sea turtles use 4 flippers to swim.  The front flippers are used to help pull them through the water and help them swim, and their rear flippers are used to help them steer. Using those big, strong flippers, sea turtles can swim one mile in three minutes, or about 20 miles an hour!

Depending on the species, sea turtles eat different things. For the loggerheads, they eat hard-shelled items such as blue crabs, whelks (a type of sea snail) and horseshoe crabs.  Leatherback sea turtles eat jellyfish, hawksbills eat sponges, green sea turtles eat seagrass and algae and the Kemp’s ridley sea turtles eat clams, scallops, shrimp and squid.

How would you tell a male sea turtle apart from a female sea turtle? With sea turtles, we can’t tell if a turtle is male or female until they’re a fully grown adult, which for a loggerhead is around 30-35 years old. It’s then you can tell the gender by looking at the length of their tails. Males have very long, thick tails and females have very short tails.

Sea turtles have many threats they encounter throughout their lives. Depending on their size and age, they have different predators. For adult sea turtles, their main natural predators are sharks, orca whales, but sea turtles biggest threats are humans. There are many things that we do that affect sea turtles in a big way. Sea turtles are sometimes caught on a fish hook or stuck in a shrimp net, boat propellers hit them and some of them mistake marine debris as food items.