![A loggerhead turtle grazes on sea grass. In stirring up the sea floor, the animals can pick up tens of thousands of tiny hitchhikers—small animals such as nematodes, crustaceans, and hydroids.](https://earthdive.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/loggerhead_190620-210x126.jpg)
Loggerhead Sea Turtles migrate thousands of miles through the world’s oceans, but they don’t travel solo – research shows they carry surprisingly diverse and abundant populations of tiny creatures on their shells.
A new paper published May 20 in the journal Diversity shows that loggerhead sea turtles carry an average of 34,000 individual meiofauna – tiny organisms smaller than one millimeter – on their backs. One loggerhead carried nearly 150,000 individual animals on its shell, including nematodes, crustacean larvae, and shrimp.
“There literally is a [whole] world on there,” says Jeroen Ingels, a marine ecologist at Florida State University. It’s wild to find “that kind of diversity on another organism.”
Ingels and his team discovered more than a hundred new species of meio...
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