Turtles on Treadmills! For Science!

a cute youtube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=itkAuPubbxI

But in this modern world, lights are everywhere, and the tiny reptiles can get disoriented and take a more circuitous route to find water. This exhausting venture can sometimes last hours. How does all that exercise affect the little creatures once they make it to water? Researchers at Florida Atlantic University decided to put some baby turtles to the test to figure it out.
then they got to swim with little swimsuits!!!

After the workout, the researchers then fitted the turtles into little swimsuits connected to a harness and put them in a tank of water, observing how they swam for two hours. Meanwhile, the researchers measured vital signs like oxygen consumption, glucose, plasma lactate levels as well as the number of swimming strokes they performed.


the results:
What they found is that the tiny turtles are incredibly tough. “We were completely surprised by the results of this study,” Milton says in the release. “We were expecting that the hatchlings would be really tired from the extended crawling and that they would not be able to swim well.” That turned out not to be the case. “They are, in fact, crawling machines,” she says. “They crawl and rest, crawl and rest and that’s why they weren’t too tired to swim.”
link: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart...mas-180967639/