How to Track a Sea Turtle: 3 Technologies and What They Reveal, with Dr. Liberty Boyd

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Dr. Liberty Boyd went into college wanting to be an elementary school teacher, and she quickly figured out that wasn’t her path. What replaced it was a decade-long pursuit to learn what sea turtles are actually doing the 99% of their lives they’re not up on the beach nesting. So much turtle research focuses on nesting, lights, and hatchlings, but Liberty wanted to know what happens in the water.

To find out, she strapped cameras, acoustic transmitters, and Apple-Watch-style motion trackers onto turtles across the Bahamas, Bermuda, and Australia. In this episode, she walks me through what those tags revealed, and she also shares a piece of career news she says you’re hearing here first!

About Liberty Boyd, Ph.D.

Liberty is a South Florida marine scientist who studies sea turtle movement ecology aka the where, and more importantly, the why, of how turtles use the ocean.

She earned her PhD at Florida International University (with an integrated master’s along the way), lived and taught for two years at the Cape Eleuthera Institute and Island School in the Bahamas, and returned to Florida Atlantic University (where she did her undergrad) for a postdoctoral fellowship studying harmful algal bloom toxins in nesting loggerheads.

She’s also one of the marine science creators I most admire on social media, sharing field work, PhD-survival honesty, and ocean advocacy with a big, engaged following. You can find her as Libertyology on Instagram and TikTok.

In this episode, we get into…

• Why she ditched her plan to be a teacher, and what a summer camp had to do with it

• The three tracking technologies she used on turtles, and what each one can see that the others can’t

• What “mastering out” of a PhD means, and why she wishes more people knew it was an option

• The turtles in Bermuda that are actively steering around boats and what that says about protecting them

• Why the jellyfish-eating turtles in Australia roam so much farther than the seagrass-eaters

• The difference between a postdoc “job” and a postdoc fellowship — and why she’d only learned it the hard way

• Why harmful algal blooms are so hard to get ahead of, and how her research is trying to

• Her advice for anyone landlocked or waiting on the “perfect” first opportunity in marine science

• The decade-long relationship that quietly turned into her next job

Some Key Takeaways from My Chat with Liberty

Different animal tags answer different questions.

Liberty didn’t just slap satellite tags on turtles and call it a day. She paired camera-equipped satellite tags, passive acoustic arrays, and accelerometers. Each one was chosen to answer a specific piece of the puzzle, from fine-scale position to raw energy expenditure.

In the episode, she breaks down how each one works in plain language, including how you triangulate a turtle’s exact spot using a grid of underwater microphones and, as she puts it, “a lot of math.”

Turtles are making choices we can see in the data.

Across her study sites, the turtles weren’t moving at random. In Bermuda, they avoided high-boat-traffic zones even at a cost to their foraging; in Australia, diet shaped how far they wandered.

Liberty explains why that matters for conservation as seagrass declines and turtles are forced to adapt what and where they eat.

Her postdoc opened a new frontier: toxins.

After her PhD, Liberty pivoted to studying how harmful algal bloom toxins show up in nesting loggerheads along Florida’s coast. It’s a topic she says is badly under-monitored, especially on the East Coast.

We get into why these blooms are a growing threat to turtles, other marine megafauna, and human health alike, and what building a baseline for a problem nobody’s measured yet actually looks like.

Showing up for people, for years, pays off.

Liberty’s next role, Director of Research and Development at the National Save the Sea Turtle Foundation, grew out of a relationship she’d been nurturing since an undergrad thesis project (so, for roughly a decade!)

She’s candid about what it actually takes to keep a professional connection alive over that length of time, and why the occasional low-stakes check-in email is worth much more than you’d think.

Connect with Liberty!

• Follow Libertyology on Instagram

• Follow Libertyology on TikTok

Links from the Episode

• Florida International University

• Florida Atlantic University

• Cape Eleuthera Institute & Island School (Bahamas)

• Loggerhead Marinelife Center (Juno Beach, FL)

• National Save the Sea Turtle Foundation

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