 |
|
Sea Turtles: Amazing, Ancient and Adapted for Swimming
These big, bulky creatures weighing up to 1,000 pounds can swim gracefully through the ocean like ballet dancers.
With domed shells colored olive-green, yellow, greenish-brown and black, sea turtles can look a lot like the turtles you see on land. But they’re different in important ways. For one, sea turtles can’t pull into their shells the way land turtles do. Also, their flippers are specially designed to swim and dive.
The 7 Species of Sea Turtles:
Leatherbacks, the largest of seven species of sea turtles, often dive more than 1,000 feet and sometimes as deep as 3,900 feet. These strong swimmers are members of the reptile family, and have front limbs called foreflippers -- long, powerful paddles that can beat through the water like wings. Hind flippers, or sea turtles’ back limbs, keep the turtle stable and can help it dig nests in the sand when it’s time to lay eggs.
One of the coolest things about sea turtles is the way females come ashore to very specific nesting beaches to lay their eggs. For leatherbacks, that can be a 3,000 mile trip!
Most species, but not leatherbacks, nest in the warm months. Females come ashore at night, at high tide. They crawl above the high-tide line, dig a nest and drop 50 to 200 eggs the size and shape of Ping-Pong balls. Then the female gently covers the eggs with sand and heads back to the sea.
When it’s time to hatch, the baby turtles -- called hatchlings -- break open their shells with a temporary egg tooth called a caruncle. Digging their way to the surface can take the hatchlings three to seven days! These teeny turtles use moonlight to guide their dangerous trip back to sea. Artificial lights on the beach can point the hatchlings the wrong way, making them easy prey for predators. Once in the water, the hatchling swims like crazy for one to two days to reach safer, deeper water.
Sea turtles live in warm, tropical seas or those that are temperate, meaning free from weather extremes, like the waters off the coast of New Jersey and Connecticut. Six species are found in U.S. waters: the green, hawksbill, Kemp’s Ridley, leatherback, loggerhead and olive ridley sea turtles. Scientists distinguish sea turtles by the number of scutes (horny plates) on their shell and the pattern of those plates.
Green and black sea turtles eat a plant-based, or herbivorous, diet of sea grasses and algae. Loggerheads and Ridleys have jaws that can crush and grind shellfish such as crabs, mollusks and shrimp. They also like jellyfish and plants.
Turtles have been hunted for meat or can get tangled in fishing lines or trash in the ocean, causing their numbers to become very low. Groups such as Defenders of Wildlife are working very hard to help the turtles recover. It’s now against the law to kill, capture or even bother a sea turtle.
When on the beach, you can help these ancient turtles by not disturbing their nests, picking up trash and turning out lights that you can see from the beach at night. For more tips on how to help sea turtles, see www.defenders.org/wildlife_and_habitat/wildlife/sea_turtles
Closing the Loop...
Lifecycle Analysis Means Better Choices for the Environment
Have you checked your backpack lately? It probably contains dozens of items: note books, pencils, a lunchbox, a cell phone, a bottle of water or maybe yesterday’s gym clothes. Some of these items you’ll use over and over again, but others you might dispose of after just one use. In either case, understanding what these items are made of, how they’re manufactured and distributed, and how they’re disposed of at the end of their useful life can help us make choices that are better for the environment.
This process of looking at a product from its design to its disposal is called a lifecycle assessment, and it helps companies consider the environmental impact of the products they create.
You don’t have to be a scientist to understand the lifecycle of many of the ordinary items we use or encounter every day. Everything that’s manufactured or exists in nature is created from other raw materials or matter. For example, as a flower grows, it uses nutrients from the earth, energy from the sun, water and air. After it blooms, it dies and decays back into the soil, returning nutrients that will be used to grow other plants and trees. Just as living plants go through a series of stages to complete their life cycles, the products we use must also complete a life cycle. So let’s look in that backpack and consider that bottle of water.
Most beverage bottles are made from plastic. Although some plastics are made from plant based materials, most of it is manufactured from petroleum (oil). Here’s how it works.
The process begins when the oil is extracted from the ground or sea floor. From there, it’s moved to a refinery for processing. Oil can be used for many things, such as running your car or heating your house. Some of it is processed into a polymer called polyethylene terephthalate better known as PET. (You’ll know it’s PET, because it will be labeled with a 1 at the bottom.)
Next, the polymer is processed into plastic pellets and sent to another manufacturer -- one that creates preforms, which are small test tube-sized objects. The preforms are transported to a bottler, where heat is used to expand and shape the preform into a bottle.
Then the bottle is filled with your favorite beverage and shipped to a store or school, where it’s available for sale. Because plastic is lightweight yet sturdy, beverages in plastic take less fuel to ship to the store than beverages in glass or metal -- an important consideration in a lifecycle assessment of this product.
But, we’re not at the end of this product’s lifecycle yet. It’s what happens next that determines whether this product’s lifecycle loop will remain closed or will be broken. Once this plastic bottle ends up in the hands of a consumer, it can be reused, recycled or tossed away -- where it’s destined for a landfill. Unlike a plant that decays in soil, plastic bottles left in a landfill can’t return to their original state. So it’s up to you, the consumer, to close the loop by recycling the bottle. PET is one of the most commonly recycled forms of plastic, and when it’s recycled it can be made into new bottles or other plastic-based products. But the loop is broken when you throw away an item that could have been reused or recycled.
Understanding the life cycle of a product can help you make wiser environmental choices about the products you buy and how you dispose of them.
Read all the webpages in ShopRite's Earth 2009 newsletter. Then test your knowledge with this puzzle. All of the answers are included somewhere in this issue. Scroll all the way down to check your answers are at the bottom of this page... don't peek!
Across
1. The (one word) Wildlife Foundation is the name of the New Jersey Organization that protects threatened and endangered wildlife.
6. Plants are (one word) when they are not originally from your area and compete with those that are native to your area.
8. This type of light bulb is being replaced by the energy-efficient compact fluorescent light bulb (CFL).
10. The Earth Day Network’s 2009 initiative is (two words).
14. The process of looking at a product from its design to its disposal is called a (one word) assessment.
15. The short name for the polymer called polyethylene terephthalate is (one word) .
16. Power coming from the sun rather than from fossil fuels is (one word).
17. Scientists distinguish sea turtles by the number of these on their shell. (one word)
Down
2. This sea creature’s diet consists of sea grasses and algae. (two words)
3. What you are creating in your backyard when you give animals safe cover, food and places to nest.
4. The label that indicates a product is energy efficient and helps you make energy-efficient choices is (two words) .
5. The guide in New Jersey that is considered a master blueprint to help declining and protected species is called the (two words) Plan.
7. The current push toward sustainability is the latest evolution of the modern (one word) movement.
9. The United Nations term defined as: meeting present needs, without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.
11. The annual COA coastal clean-up event is called (two words).
12. The 3R’s include these three terms: Reduce, Reuse and (one word).
13. The name for the small plastic “test tubes” that are really the step before making a plastic bottle is (one word).
Answers
Across 1. Conserve 6. Invasive 8. Incandescent 10. Green Generation 14. Lifecycle 15. PET 16. Solar 17. Scutes Down 2. Sea Turtle 3. Habitat 4. Energy Star 5. Wildlife Action 7. Environmental 9. Sustainability 11. Beach Sweeps 12. Recycle 13. Preforms
Copyright © ShopRite, All rights reserved. | Developed by MyWebGrocer, Inc.