Nature Seekers sea turtle conservation group founder Solomon Aguilllera examines a nesting female leatherback turtle (credit: Dr. Scott A. Eckert).
When I had the privilege of touching a leatherback sea turtle, I was struck by the true immeasurability of time, all wrapped up in one mythical beast. What immediately drew my attention was not what you might expect. It wasn’t the carapace—which was squishy, in contrast with the species’ moniker. It was not the size, which is overwhelming. Leatherback sea turtle are creatures of huge proportions; as big as a Volkswagen Beetle and nearly as heavy, they are the largest of the reptiles. No. I was astounded by this turtle’s approachability. As I was kneeling in the sand witnessing an egg-laying female leatherback on a dark beach in Trinidad, I was immersed in a cycle of birth and renewal that has gone on for hundreds of millions of years. Your mind just can’t fully fathom how long that really is.
It should be noted that in the United States, it is illegal to touch an endangered species. In my case, I was fortunate to be with a team of researchers conducting a long-term study on leatherback sea turtles, so I was able to get some “hands-on” experience. Also, even giant leatherbacks are intolerant of people, so as with any sea turtles coming ashore, it is important to remain perfectly still and quiet until the mother is about halfway through digging her nest chamber. Otherwise, she is likely to be spooked and head back to the ocean.
The best place to see leatherback turtles is Matura Beach on the northeast shore of the island of Trinidad. That is where Duke University marine biologist Scott Eckert has been working with them for years. He is the world’s leading authority on leatherback sea turtles. In the early 1980s, he pioneered the research into the behavior of these marine goliaths. The first time I met him was on a pitch-black beach in Trinidad. When I asked him how he was able to conduct his research under such conditions, he told me, “Sea turtle ecologists get pretty good at working in the dark since that’s when the turtles come up on the shore to nest.”
While we stood on the beach together, Scott explained that the critically endangered leatherbacks have declined more than 90 percent in just the last decade. To put that in perspective, until the 1990s turtle biologists used to say that there were around 120,000 to 130,000 leatherback sea turtles in the earth’s oceans; today there are now far less than 30,000. It is a species that has declined faster than any other large vertebrate in history.
A Comeback in Trinidad
The Pacific Ocean is where experts have seen almost the entire decline due to years of the overharvesting of eggs and drowning of turtles in fishing gear far from the nesting beaches. But in Trinidad, the Atlantic and the Caribbean leatherback populations are actually seeing an increase in numbers. And Trinidad supports the second largest nesting colony of leatherbacks in the world.
Scott believes the credit for Trinidad’s successful conservation rests with the involvement of local people. When people visit turtles on Matura Beach on the northeast shore of Trinidad, they are guided by a remarkable group called Nature Seekers. This community-based conservation organization is located in the tiny village of Matura and has been granted the complete responsibility by the government of Trinidad and Tobago for the management and protection of the Matura Beach nesting colony. Nature Seekers must be from the village, which helps ensure that local stakeholders retain a sense of ownership and pride in this important nesting colony. Scott has long been their science adviser.
Nature Seekers have been able to build a huge support network for protecting the leatherback on the island. It is such a matter of national pride that you could say that the leatherback sea turtle has become the panda bear of Trinidad—the national symbol. Of the ten thousand visitors who come to Matura each season to see nesting turtles, more than 75 percent are from Trinidad itself.
Scott also serves as the director of science for the Wider Caribbean Sea Turtle Conservation Network (WIDECAST), which provides funding, training, and scientific support to any group in the Caribbean trying to maintain stable sea turtle populations. WIDECAST strongly believes in collaboration with local communities—based on the simple premise that what’s good for the turtles is also good for the people and the economy.
And it’s clearly working because the Caribbean is the only region in the world where sea turtle populations are on the rebound, even though they are only a fraction of what they were historically. Scott told me, “You can read reports of Columbus’s first voyage to the Caribbean and his complaints that they couldn’t sail into some of the nearshore bays because the green turtles were so thick that they had to pole them out of the way.”
Sea turtles are faced with many of the same challenges as other endangered species. Most of those, naturally, are anthropogenic, or caused by humans. Sea turtles have historically suffered from egg collection, disturbance of nesting beaches, and being harvested for food. But after hundreds of years of chronic stress to these populations, what brought about their near-total collapse of the leatherback was the industrialization of oceanic fishing. The development of high-seas gill-net and longline fisheries meant that humans were able to fish on a far bigger scale than ever before.
Seafood as a resource is a very complex issue today. It is more of a free-for-all than a managed, sustainable harvest. And even well-intentioned diners can inadvertently support a deadly game for turtles. Take, for instance, the oft-held-up practice of longline fishing. This is used primarily for swordfish and tuna, and many promote it as sustainable harvesting. However, it is hard on leatherbacks, who also are predators and live in the open ocean. As Scott pointed out, a number of turtle experts are working with fisheries leaders to create a more sustainable system.
In the Caribbean, the principal pressure on sea turtles is coastal fishing, particularly traditional gill-net fishing. Boats with gill nets may not seem like a big problem, but in Trinidad alone three thousand female leatherbacks are caught in these nets each year, making up 50 percent of the nesting population. And somewhere around 30 percent of those drown.
However, Scott’s view of the future remains buoyant: “Everyone in Trinidad loves their turtles and wants to help.” So two years ago, they began a program to develop less destructive fishing methods for Trinidad’s artisanal gill-net fleets. “It is truly a cooperative program, with fishers and turtle patrollers working together to test better fishing methods,” Scott told me. In the summer of 2007, they tested two new ways for fishers to work that reduced leatherback entanglement rates more than 80 percent and provided a significant gain in fishers’ incomes. “Needless to say,” Scott said, “both the fishers and the turtle conservation organizations are very enthusiastic about our results and look forward to continuing the work!”
