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Examples of ENSO-Society InteractionsUsing the El Niño-Southern Oscillation to Predict Indo-Pacific Green Turtle PopulationsNeville Nicholls Bureau of Meteorology Research Centre Melbourne, Australia ~~~ The green turtle, Chelonia mydas, is a large, long-lived, herbivorous marine reptile that grazes on coastal seagrass and algal pastures. Female green turtles do not breed annually. It takes more than a year for a female to lay down her fat reserves and deposit the yolk stores in her ovaries in preparation for breeding. The number of females recorded at nesting beaches in eastern Australia varies widely (by orders of magnitude) from year-to-year, and the fluctuations occur synchronously at all the nesting beaches. These inter-annual fluctuations are not due to fluctuations in the number of adult turtles, but to changes in the proportion of adult females that prepare to breed in a particular year.
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