T. Todd Jones

I currently work in the area of bioenergetics, in the field of study now being coined as conservation physiology. My goals are to understand the bioenergetics (energy use/allocation) of sea turtles and how resource availability, abundance and human perturbations such as climate change affect their reproductive output and growth. All of this in the context of population decline. My research is based on the fundamental principal that growth rate and metabolic rate are the 2 most important factors for understanding a species and for managing a species on the brink of extinction.
Recently I have been looking at energy partitioning in leatherbacks, determining total daily metabolism as well as total energy to build a sexually mature female. How much energy during the life of a leatherback goes to: growth, osmoregulation, digestion, locomotion, thermoregulation and other processes. I then look at how resource availability and abundance affects partitioning and thus allocation of energy to somatic growth and reproductive growth. Somatic growth gets you to sexually mature size and is then replaced by reproductive growth at maturity. Anything that pulls resources away from Somatic and Reproductive growth will in turn slow down time to sexual maturity and increase remigration intervals and thus decrease Reproductive Output. This is what is leading to the decline of the Pacific Leatherback.