Deepest Diving Sea Turtle

The Deepest Diving Sea Turtle was known as Tika on February 2, 2009 at 4 am setting off from the coast of Gabon, West Africa. Her secret voyages revealed using transmitter. This turtle spent almost six months of swimming across Atlantic, a 5, 000 mile journey to the coast of South America. She is expected to swim back to Africa by March next year and if all goes well, she'll then build a nest and lay eggs in the sands of Mayumba national park in Gabon thus this will be just one of the many 10, 000 mile round trips she makes in her 50 year life span.

Scientists know all of this because, for the first time, they have tracked the journeys taken by leatherback turtles as they cross the Atlantic Ocean, with Tika travelling the furthest of the 25 females that were followed in a study lasting more than five years. She, along with another female called Regab, ended up in the waters off Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay. Others stayed closer to Africa, but still their journeys lasted for months and they swam thousands of miles. One, named Caroline by researchers, swam around the middle of the Atlantic for more than a year and a half, clocking up more than 7,000 miles, before returning to breed.

In the Pacific, numbers of leatherback Deepest Diving Sea Turtle have plummeted in the past few decades, as they are caught and drowned in fishing nets.