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Follow the Turtles

Kara Dodge, a postdoctoral investigator at WHOI, tags a leatherback turtle during a 2016 expedition in Vineyard Sound. Dodge and WHOI engineer Amy Kukulya are the brains and muscle behind TurtleCam, an initiative they started in 2013 to autonomously track and film sea turtles in their natural environment. TurtleCam is an adaptation of SharkCam, which Kukulya and colleagues in the Oceanographic Systems Lab developed to track sharks in the wild. Like SharkCam, TurtleCam uses autonomous underwater vehicles to better understand the feeding habits of marine animals, as well as the challenges they face during their day-to-day lives in the ocean. (Photo by Sean Whelan, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)