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Wed Jun 16, 3:52 pm ET
MIAMI (AFP) Move over James Cameron. A sea turtle found a waterproof camera
in the Caribbean, somehow activated the device, filmed itself and is now a
YouTube sensation.
Back in May US Coast Guard agent Paul Schultz found a digital camera in a
waterproof case on a beach in Key West, Florida, and posted images he found on
its memory chip on the Internet in an attempt to find its owner.
In a video clip dated January 2010 "a turtle came across the camera, and it's
really hard to tell how, but it turns the camera on and recorded itself
swimming with the camera," Schultz told AFP.
"When I saw the video, I thought first that someone was getting attacked by a
sea creature," Schultz said.
"I thought that a diver was getting attacked," he said. However, he later
realized that the camera was just hitching a ride with a sea turtle.
"The last thing the camera owner did was shoot a video underwater, and then it
goes right into the next video with the camera turning around in the water,"
Schultz said.
The video can be seen at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E43sg-Ytt58.
Schultz eventually found the owner, a Dutch navy sailor who lost the camera
when he was diving off the island of Aruba in November.
As the crow flies, Aruba, off the Caribbean coast of Venezuela, is some 1,800
kilometers (1,100 miles) from Key West, Florida.
But the camera likely took a roundabout journey on the Loop Current, which
would have taken it from Aruba to the coast of central America, past Belize and
the Yucatan peninsula, around the western coast of Cuba, into the Gulf Stream
and on to the Florida Keys.
"I'm totally amazed about this," Schultz said.