Video data from pop-off camera deployments on green sea turtles in San Diego, California

The cryptic and aquatic life histories of sea turtles have made them a challenging group to directly observe, leaving significant knowledge gaps regarding social behavior and fine-scale elements of habitat use. Using a custom-designed animal-borne camera, we observed previously undocumented behaviors by green turtles (Chelonia mydas) at a foraging area in San Diego Bay, a highly urbanized ecosystem in California, USA. We deployed a suction-cup-attached pop-off camera (manufactured by Customized Animal Tracking Solutions) on 11 turtles (mean straight carapace length = 84.0 ± 11.2 cm) for between 1 and 30.8 h. Video recordings, limited to sunlit hours, provided 73 h of total observation time between May 2022 and June 2023. We observed 32 conspecific interactions; we classified 18 as active, entailing clear social behaviors, as compared with 14 passive interactions representing brief, chance encounters. There was no evidence for agonistic interactions. The camera additionally revealed that..., Data were collected via deployable camera manufactured by Customized Animal Tracking Solution and custom-designed for sea turtles. See Mullaney et al. (2024) for elaboration, available open access at the following link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/ece3.11282, , # Video data from pop-off camera deployments on green sea turtles in San Diego, California

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.05qfttf9t](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.05qfttf9t)

Video data were collected via a deployable, underwater pop-off camera that was attached to foraging green sea turtles (*Chelonia mydas*) in a series of deployments within San Diego Bay, California, USA over 2022–2023.

San Diego Bay represents a regionally important foraging area for East Pacific green turtles and hosts a mix of size/age classes. More information on turtles sampled and deployment metadata can be found in the accompanying open access journal article by Mullaney et al. (2024); [http://doi.org/10.1002/ece3.11282](http://doi.org/10.1002/ece3.11282).

The pop-off camera was manufactured by Customized Animal Tracking Solutions (CATS) and attached with suction cups to the carapace of individual turtles after capture with entanglement nets during annual mark-recapture monitoring by scientists with NOAA'...