I am currently leading a small research group, known as Islameta Research Group, which studies of the migrations and long-distance movements of animals, with special attention to marine turtles. The group is part of the Ethology unit of the Dept. of Biology, University of Pisa.
The research of the group was originally focused on the navigational and orientation systems the animals rely on to reach specific targets, following a fruitful line of research started by the late Prof. Floriano Papi (formerly full professor of Ethology at the University of Pisa) with experiments on sea turtle migrations and navigation in the 1990s and 2000s.
In more recent years, the group has broadened its interests to include other aspects of sea turtle spatial ecology (like the effects of environmental factors on movements or their diving behaviour), also extending its target to other long-distance navigators such as seabirds or ducks.
Isla Meta (“goal island” in Spanish) makes reference to a chapter of the book “The sea turtle, so excellent a fishe” (1967) of the American zoologist Archie Carr (a pioneer in the studies of sea turtle migrations), in which the possible navigational systems used by sea turtles during their oceanic migrations, are discussed. The chapter is mostly focused on the navigational cues used by those turtles which migrate towards specific targets like a tiny island in the middle of the ocean. The author especially examines the case of green turtles (Chelonia mydas), which shuttle between Brazil and the remote Ascension Island in the South Atlantic Ocean: an epic migratory journey that has been reconstructed for the first time in 1997 by researchers of this group (click here for details).
The Islameta Group is presently composed, beside myself, by the following people of the Department of Biology:
Dr. Paolo Casale (senior researcher)
Dr. Dimitri Giunchi (researcher)
Dr. Resi Mencacci (research technician)
Dr. Giulia Cerritelli (post-doc).
For our research we are actively collaborating with a number of different colleagues throughout the world, among which:
- Prof. Graeme C. Hays, Swansea University, UK
- Prof. Brendan J. Godley, University of Exeter, UK
- Prof. Susanne Akesson, Lund University, Sweden
- Dr. Giacomo Santini, University of Florence,Italy
- Prof. Yakup Kaska and the Dekamer Research Centre, Turkey
- Dr. Simon Benhamou, CNRS Montpellier, France
- Prof. Antonio Mingozzi, Calabria University, Italy