PhD candidate Rosie Brown investigates flatback foraging

February 2026

What’s on the menu for flatback turtles?

PhD candidate Rosie Brown is investigating how environmental variables impact a population of foraging flatback turtles in Yawuru Sea Country. She has recently returned from her sixth trip catching and sampling turtles in Yawuru Nagulagun Roebuck Bay alongside Yawuru DBCA rangers and Nyamba Buru Yawuru Country Managers.

Rosie aims to understand how important the health of foraging grounds is for the reproductive potential of adult turtles, by specifically investigating diet and fat reserves.

To answer these questions, blood and skin samples have been taken from the turtles for Stable Isotope Analysis and cloacal swabs for eDNA analysis. Both methods will identify the types of food the turtles have been eating across time.

What a turtle eats influences the amount of fat in their bodies and potentially their reproductive output (e.g. how often they breed). Rosie is measuring the fat reserves of flatbacks by taking weight and body measurements, ultrasound scans and conducting bioelectrical impedance analysis - like the body composition scanners at the gym. This is a first for flatback turtles!

Rosie will head back to the field in April for a final field trip, before analysing the results to complete her PhD. She works with DBCA’s North West Shelf Flatback Turtle Conservation Program (NWSFTCP) and is based out of the PEAC Lab at Murdoch University’s Harry Butler Institute. The project has supplementary funding from the Ecological Society of Australia and the Royal Society of Western Australia.

You can read more about Rosie's PhD research project here.