'It's similar to how we might memorize where our favorite pizza place is.'
Loggerhead sea turtles (Caretta caretta) are pretty loyal marine reptiles. Even with their roughly 8,000-mile-long migrations across oceans, they consistently return to the same feeding and nesting sites. Sea turtles can travel these distances by remembering the magnetic signatures of an area and storing that knowledge in a mental map. However, the internal mechanisms behind this have been a bit of a mystery. New lab experiments reveal that they do a "turtle dance" when they reach an area that they associate with food, indicating how they are using magnetic fields to memorize where ecologically important areas are located. The findings are detailed in a study published February 12 in the journal Nature. Turtle dance behavior is a distinctive food-anticipatory behavior of captive-reared sea turtles. Hallmarks of the behavior include some or all of the following: tilting the body vertically, raising the head near to or above the water surface, opening the mouth, paddling alternately with the front flippers ('dogpaddling'), and occasionally spinning in place. Turtles typically display most elements of this behavior in the presence of food. During experimental trials when food is absent, turtle dance behavior is typically more subdued and limited to elements such as tilting towards the vertical, approaching the surface, and opening the mouth. The video shows one sequence of vigorous turtle dance behavior in the presence of food, followed by several more subtle instances of turtle dance behavior when a turtle was in the rewarded magnetic field but food was absent. Turtles swimming in the unrewarded field are also shown to illustrate baseline behavior for comparative purposes. CREDIT: Goforth et al., Nature (2025). Turtle dance behavior is a distinctive food-anticipatory behavior of captive-reared sea turtles. Hallmarks of the behavior include some or all of the following: tilting the body vertically, raising the head near to or above the water surface, opening the…