The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

It’s midnight. Kayla Goforth and her research assistants have been traveling by car, boat and even golf cart for some seven hours to get to Bald Head Island — but the work is just beginning. They get into a utility task vehicle and head to their field site: the nest of a loggerhead sea turtle. A biology doctoral student in Ken Lohmann’s lab at Carolina, Goforth studies the magnetic orientation of loggerhead sea turtle embryos. Scientists already know that sea turtles navigate using a sense called magnetoreception, allowing them to detect slight fluctuations between Earth’s magnetic fields at different latitudes and longitudes.