Kayla Goforth “Best Talk” Award

Kayla Goforth, a Biology graduate student (Lohmann Lab), received the Marlene Zuk Award at the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB) in Austin, Texas. The Zuk Award is given for the best student talk in the Animal Behavior division of SICB. Kayla’s talk, titled “The Role of Magnetic Field Detection in Foraging Site Fidelity of Sea Turtles”, described experiments revealing that captive loggerhead turtles that are fed in a magnetic field characteristic of a specific coastal location can learn to recognize that field and associate it with food. The results provide insight into how turtles learn the locations of particular foraging sites and can navigate to them across hundreds of miles of open sea.