On 2 February 2009, at 4am, a turtle known as Tika set off from the coast of Gabon, west Africa. She spent almost six months swimming across the Atlantic, a 5,000-mile (8,000km) journey to the coast of South America. At the moment she is probably somewhere off Brazil, eating jellyfish and building herself up. In about March next year, she'll begin her journey back to Africa, and, if all goes well, she'll then build a nest and lay her eggs in the sands of the Mayumba national park in Gabon. And this will be just one of many 10,000-mile round trips she makes in her 50-year life.
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.
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