common or abundant [these categories are "borrowed" from Bacon 

 (1981)]. Those 13 are listed in Table 3. Having done that, one 

 is reduced mostly to posing questions and problems concerning 

 foraging loggerheads, because little or no quantitative 

 information about size or stability of these populations is 

 available. I have attempted to update the foraging distribution, 

 depicted by light stippling in Figure 1, but this, too, provides 

 more questions than answers. Some of the more important 

 questions are: 1) What are the sizes or densities of foraging 

 populations and how stable are they? 2) What is the stage-class 

 composition of these populations? 3) How contiguous or 

 homogeneous are these populations to which we have arbitrarily 

 given national or regional identities? One of the few ways to 

 answer the latter question is through tagging studies of foraging 

 animals. Only in very few places is this being done, so I have 

 purposely not connected the foraging areas on the map, even 

 though foraging populations must surely be contiguous over large 

 parts of the region. 



The only place that I know where the first question is 

 beginning to be addressed is along the east coast of Florida. My 

 students and I have been studying the loggerhead population of 

 the Indian River Lagoon system there for about 10 years. In 

 spite of a respectable rate of recapture of previously tagged 

 animals, however, we are still only able to estimate population 

 size and density for relatively small reaches of the Indian 

 River, but not for the 1,450 km lagoon system as a whole. In the 

 same general area Henwood (1987) has recently described the large 

 aggregation of loggerheads at Port Canaveral, but whether or not 

 that is a "foraging population," as we usually think of that 

 term, is problematic. 



Equally puzzling are the results of open-ocean aerial 

 surveys, especially those off the east coast of Florida. 

 Schroeder and Thompson (1987) observed over 2,300 loggerheads 

 over a three year period, with peak sightings during the spring 

 and summer. Most of the loggerheads were seen inside the 40 m 

 isobath and shoreward of the western boundary of the Gulf Stream. 

 Fritts et al. (1983) and Hoffman and Fritts (1982) reported 

 similar results. The marked restriction of the loggerheads to 

 the shallow part of the continental shelf suggests that they 

 were, indeed, foraging there. Whether or not these pelagic 

 aerial surveys are feasible methods for jestimating population 

 size and stability in the long run remains to be seen. At this 

 juncture the pelagic survey method constitutes a vantage point 

 from which the loggerhead population on the continental shelf may 

 be viewed, but there is, as yet, no basis for analysis of trends. 



Some answers are available to the question about stage 

 composition of foraging populations, but not many. Clearly, in 

 some areas subadults and adults remain completely separate as 

 foraging populations. In the Indian River Lagoon system of east 



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