A turtle built around its head. The skull is enormous in proportion to the animal and packed with jaw muscle, and it is a tool: loggerheads eat armored prey - conchs, clams, crabs, horseshoe crabs - and crush them outright. Nothing else in the sea turtle family works this way.
The other thing they are known for is navigation. A hatchling leaves a beach, spends years drifting in ocean currents, and comes back as an adult to nest within tens of kilometers of where it was born - and the mechanism is magnetic. Turtles read the inclination and intensity of the earth's field as a positional signature, learn their natal beach's value as hatchlings, and steer back to it decades later. Experiments in which the field around a turtle is altered send it off in the corresponding wrong direction.
Those migrations are enormous: individuals tagged in the Pacific have crossed from 🇯🇵 Japan to 🇲🇽 Mexico and back.
It is Vulnerable on the IUCN Red List and on CITES Appendix I, and its main threat is fishing gear - loggerheads drown in nets and take baited hooks meant for tuna. In this sea it is uncommon, and usually seen in open water rather than on a reef.
- very large blocky head, much bigger in proportion than in other sea turtles
- reddish-brown shell with five pairs of scutes along each side
- heavy body, often with barnacles on the shell
- shell length up to 125 cm
