Katia has begun relaying regular data once again! One of the reasons we believed for the lack of data was that she was simply moving too fast and it seems that that was indeed the case. When she last transmitted a location on September 14th, Katia was located south of Nantucket just heading into deeper water. We had received a few short Argos transmissions indication the transmitter was functioning but the system was unable to calculate location due to the the corrupt and brief transmissions.
Over the past few days, Katia has slowed down and we are once again receiving a ton of data. The curious bit is that she is now located off the coast of Virginia almost 650 kilometers southwest of Nantucket. The PAT tag she is towing incorporates a Fastloc GPS device which logs location and the tag should relay data revealing her route back to Virginia. Where do you think she will travel next?
Explore the current map below:
The long term tracking of leatherbacks is a collaborative project with the National Marine Fisheries Service. If you wish to access these data for a school research project or wish to collaborate with us, please do not hesitate to contact us. We share and license data using a Creative Commons license 