This week I moved from an octopus series to a sea turtle series. Who can look at new hatchlings scrambling from their nests to meet the sea and not fall head over heels in love? It's an 11"X14" mixed media work, a combo of acrylic painting with torn paper collage of handprinted monoprints on stretched canvas.
Fun facts on sea turtles:
Unlike other turtles, sea turtles cannot retract their flippers and head into their shells. Their streamlined shells and large paddle-shaped flippers make them very agile and graceful swimmers. In the water, their rear flippers are used as rudders, for steering.
Sea turtles are deep divers and can stay underwater for long periods of time. Sea turtles breathe air, but they have the ability, under natural conditions, to remain submerged for hours at a time. They even sleep underwater.
The sex of sea turtles, like many other turtles, is determined by the temperature in the nest. Cooler incubation temperatures produce male hatchlings and warmer incubation temperatures produce female hatchlings. Temperatures that fluctuate between the two extremes will produce a mix of male and female hatchlings.
Leatherbacks are highly migratory, some swimming more than 10,000 miles a year between nesting and foraging grounds. They are also accomplished divers with the deepest recorded dive reaching nearly 4,000 feet—deeper than most marine mammals. (K's note: When I swim laps, I swim a mile, takes me 45 mins, give or take [I'm not a great swimmer]. Simply cannot imagine how leatherbacks can swim 10,000 mi/yr.)