Validation of back-calculated body lengths and timing of growth mark deposition in Hawaiian green sea turtles.

Somatic growth rate data for wild sea turtles can provide insight into life-stage durations, time to maturation, and total lifespan. When appropriately validated, the technique of skeletochronology allows prior growth rates of sea turtles to be calculated with considerably less time and labor than required by mark--recapture studies. We applied skeletochronology to 10 dead, stranded green turtles Chelonia mydas that had previously been measured, tagged, and injected with OTC (oxytetracycline) during mark-recapture studies in Hawaii for validating skeletochronological analysis.

Application of diffusion approximation for risk assessments of sea turtle populations.

Population viability analysis (PVA) to forecast extinction risk is a commonly used tool in decision- and policy-making processes of governments and conservation organizations. A drawback to PVA is the high degree of uncertainty in these forecasts due to both population stochasticity and parameter estimation uncertainty. With sparse or noisy data, extinction probabilities frequently have 95% confidence intervals ranging from 0 to 1.