Voyage of the Turtle: Uncertain Future for Leatherbacks

July 20, 2007

An elderly woman stood on a beach singing, her face painted with colorful lines and white dots. Her long grey hair whipped by the wind was held back from her face by a wide red headband.

She traveled to this California beach from her home in Mexico to perform an ancient ritual. It is a ritual that, like the sea turtle it is focused on, is in danger of disappearing.

The leatherback turtle is the largest living reptile. It can grow to be nearly three meters (or nine feet) long and weigh over a ton. Its black back, not covered by a hard shell like most turtles, is leathery with ridges running from head to tail, calling to mind a Klingon’s mountainous forehead. It spends most of its life at sea and crosses entire oceans.

The Seri people, natives of coastal northwestern Mexico, believe leatherback turtles are their ancestors. One sign of this heritage is the fact that both humans and leatherbacks cry.

In years past, when a leatherback was spotted off their coast, the Seri would gather at the water and sing to it. Sometimes the turtle would come to shore seemingly enchanted by their voices, other times fishermen would bring it ashore. Then according to ancient tradition, the Seri would paint the turtle’s shell, build a shelter over it and sing to it for four days. Then the turtle would return to the sea.

“But as the leatherback population in the Pacific has declined so precipitously, they have not seen one in their territory in about 25 years,” said Carl Safina, founder of Blue Ocean Institute and author of Voyage of the Turtle.

In years past, when a leatherback was spotted off their coast, the Seri would call it ashore, paint its shell and sing to it for four days. Then the turtle would return to the sea. Photo: Blue Ocean Institute.

Safina spoke at the University of Texas at Austin on April 27, 2007 as part of the Hot Science, Cool Talk outreach lecture series hosted by the Environmental Science Institute and the Jackson School of Geosciences. He has traveled around the world studying sea turtles and alerting people to their plight.

“The elders were alarmed because they realized that most of the younger people in the tribe have never seen their most sacred animal and have forgotten how to conduct the most sacred ceremony,” he said.

Leatherbacks are thriving in the Atlantic ocean, but crashing in the Pacific.

“What are people doing right in one ocean and wrong in another?” asked Safina. “And what can be learned about what must be done? As you join me on this journey, the turtles may be speaking to you too. Perhaps you will hear something different and personal.”

Oatmeal Cookies

After 12 or more years at sea, female leatherbacks return to the beaches of their birth to lay eggs. Photo: Blue Ocean Institute.

If you’re lucky enough to be on the right beach on the right night, you might see a female leatherback rise from the water like a small car with flippers and paddle across the sand. After at least 12 years at sea, she returns to the beach of her birth to lay eggs.

Like a kind of sand plow, she uses her front flippers to dig a body pit in the sand and uses her rear flippers to delicately scoop a cylindrical chamber as long as your arm. Into this chamber, she lays dozens of golf-ball sized eggs. Afterwards, she covers over the whole thing with a mound of sand and pushes it all around to obscure the actual location of the nest. The whole process takes a couple of hours. Then she drags herself back out to sea.

A few weeks later, the eggs hatch. Under the cover of darkness, the young burst forth from the sand and dash for the ocean. They don’t stay together in a group. Once they hit the water, it’s every turtle for itself.

“The world is a dangerous place if you’re the size of an oatmeal cookie,” said Safina. The audience, including many children, laughed. “And you know what happens to oatmeal cookies.”

Sometimes birds or dogs are waiting to snatch the hatchlings up. Sometimes fishing nets and lines ensnare them. Sometimes they confuse the lights from human development behind beaches for reflections off the ocean. These disoriented hatchlings might wander off, never to find the water.

In some places, people dig up turtle eggs on beaches to eat. Everyone has to eat, right?

“The problem is, people go and take every single egg from every single turtle on a beach,” said Safina.

Those hatchlings that do make it to the water swim for two or three days straight. Using a built in compass sensitive to Earth’s magnetic field, the young turtles swim in a straight line from the beach until they reach floating seaweed or other forms of cover where they can hide and begin to start finding food, preferably jellyfish.

The leatherback is the largest living reptile. It can grow to be nearly three meters (or nine feet) long and weigh over a ton. It spends most of its life at sea and crosses entire oceans.
Photo: Scott R. Benson, NMFS Southwest Fisheries Science Center

Life is at least as precarious for adult turtles as for hatchlings in the human world. Hungry turtles can mistake plastic bags for their favorite snacks, jellyfish, inadvertently filling their stomachs with indigestible plastic. Lost fishing gear such as “ghost nets” or long lines—fishing lines with hundreds of thousands of hooks that can be up to 15 miles long—can hook, entangle and drown turtles. As the old saying goes, “Fishing nets never stop fishing.”

Adult turtles are actively hunted for their meat and for their decorative shells for jewelry, combs and sunglasses.

Humans are also lowering the reproductive success of sea turtles by altering many of the beaches the turtles use for nesting. We do this indirectly by contributing to global sea level rise and directly by building sea walls and importing sand from elsewhere.

With so many natural and human strikes against them, leatherbacks have declined in the Pacific by 95 percent since the 1980s. Why is the picture so different in the Atlantic ocean?

“People do comply with this ordinance, and as a result this beach, which is very important for people, can remain very important for turtles,” said Safina. Photo: Blue Ocean Institute.

Atlantic Rebound

Safina showed a slide of a beach flanked by high rise hotels and condos, choked with people, parasols and ice chests.

“This beach in Florida is full of people,” said Safina. “But it’s also one of the most important loggerhead turtle nesting beaches in the world.”

Volunteers go out at night when turtles are nesting and put up signs and yellow caution tape to mark off the nesting sites. “People respect those nest sites, so the beach can be shared with turtles at night and people during the daytime.”

A city ordinance requires that lights near the beach be turned off on certain nights of the year to avoid distracting turtle hatchlings.

“People do comply with this ordinance, and as a result this beach, which is very important for people, can remain very important for turtles,” said Safina.

Sea turtle survival rates are also increasing in the Atlantic due to the use of so-called turtle excluder devices or TEDs. These devices are essentially large grates that allow small fish to enter a fishing net, while excluding large sea turtles. American fishermen resisted their use for many years, but groups such as the Blue Ocean Institute lobbied for their use. Now the devices are mandated and routinely save turtles from becoming bycatch.

“Florida Loggerheads have increased impressively and although the adults have been declining in recent years, there are many juveniles that should be maturing and build up that adult population even further in the next few years,” he said.

Populations of green and Kemp’s Ridley turtles are also on the rise in the Atlantic. The Kemp’s Ridley “was a turtle that many people thought was doomed to extinction in 1985,” said Safina. “But largely because of better beach protection and the use of turtle excluder devices, it is recovering.”

The Voyage Begins

Cleotilde is the elder stateswoman and master singer of the Seri tribe in northwestern Mexico. Photo: Blue Ocean Institute.

Cleotilde, the elder stateswoman and master singer of the Seri tribe, stood with three young women on a Baja, California beach singing an ancient song. In her head, she held her people’s traditions and history. In her cupped hands, she held a turtle hatchling gathered and protected by conservationists to release into the wild.

Unable to carry on the sacred ritual with adult turtles along their coast, she adapted it for hatchlings. Despite the challenges of carrying on this tradition, everything about this moment was hopeful. If loggerheads do someday return to Seri home waters, these young women will know what to do. The Seri themselves slowly rebounded after nearly being decimated by contact with Europeans centuries ago.

They believe that sea turtles once spoke. That ability has been lost, but sea turtles are said to still understand human speech and songs. As the hatchling and several of its siblings paddled across the sand, Cleotilde sang.

“The hatchlings hit the waves and were swept up and down the beach,” said Safina. “Nothing about their start in life suggested that it was ever going to be an easy life for them.” Photo: Blue Ocean Institute.

“And then a really extraordinary thing happened,” said Safina. “Three gray whales gathered just beyond the waves of the surf, right in front of where we were standing. It was as though they were waiting to welcome the hatchlings and watching what was going on.“

“The hatchlings hit the waves and were swept up and down the beach,” said Safina. “Nothing about their start in life suggested that it was ever going to be an easy life for them.”

After surviving millions of years of climate swings and a mass extinction event that wiped out 85 percent of species, the fate of some of the planet’s hardiest creatures now seems to rest in our hands.

“Turtles have taught me this: do all you can and don’t worry about the odds against you,” said Safina. “The miracle of life’s energy is never worrying whether we may fail, concerned only that whether we may fail or succeed, we do so with all our might. That’s all we need to know to feel certain that our effort is worth our while on Earth. And that’s how the voyage begins.”

by Marc Airhart

For more information about the Jackson School contact J.B. Bird at jbird@jsg.utexas.edu, 512-232-9623.