Tireless travellers: Sea turtles swim continuously during long-distance movements

While rest and sleep are crucial to animals, our understanding of whether and how long-distance migrants rest has been thwarted by the inability to relay high-resolution data from multi-channel loggers via satellite. We overcame these obstacles for an iconic long-distance migrator by equipping five loggerhead sea turtles (Caretta caretta) with satellite tags and data-loggers providing depth and 3-D acceleration measurements. Turtles were translocated to open-sea locations and induced to complete oceanic migrations of tens of km to return to their nesting beach performing active, oriented movements. Across a total of >600 hours of high-resolution data, we observed (i) constant flipper frequency (ca. 0.5 Hz) indicating that turtles never ceased movement, (ii) intense subsurface swimming (mostly around 1 m) for about 50% of time and (iii) deeper, less active dives up to 80 m, which were made day and night and more frequently in offshore waters. Flipper beat amplitude was much smaller in..., , , # Tireless travellers: sea turtles swim continuously during long-distance movements

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.hdr7sqvrq](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.hdr7sqvrq)

The 6 .csv files contain the data recorded by the loggers during the homing trip of the five turtles (turtle C, D, E, G and two homing phases of turtle F). The first column provides a progressive number for each recording, the second one is a time stamp. The third column contains successive depth readings obtained every second (acquisition frequency 1 Hz), while the remaining 3 columns provides values of the tri-axial dynamic acceleration, deriving from original acceleration recordings (acquisition frequency 10 Hz) that have been processed as described in the manuscript. These three columns contains the values of the dynamic acceleration along the X, Y and Z axis, respectively.

The other file includes the 1-hr interpolated locations of the five tracked turtles (C-G, with two phases of turtle F), based on the original Ar...