Good News for Green Turtles as Conservation Boosts Numbers

14/11/2006 00:00:00 Long-Term Nesting Beach Protection Works

December 2007. This week in Global Ecology and Biogeography, encouraging news has emerged for one of the world’s largest marine herbivores, the green turtle, Chelonia mydas. A new study shows that long-term protection of the sea turtles’ nesting beaches is successful in achieving increases in the green turtle populations.

The authors of the article, who research green turtles in Australia, Costa Rica, Japan, and the United States, analyzed nesting data from six of the world’s major green turtle rookeries for which there are reliable long-term data of 25 years or more. The analysis shows that green turtle nesting on four beaches in the Pacific (Ogasawara, Japan; French Frigate Shoal, Hawaii, and Heron and Raine Islands, Australia) and two beaches in the Atlantic (Archie Carr National Wildlife Refuge, Florida, and Tortuguero, Costa Rica) have increased by an estimated 4-14 percent each year over the last 20-30 years. The increases in nesting varied considerably among the rookeries, most likely because historical and current exploitation of green turtles is different at each site.

’These results should be celebrated,’ said Milani Chaloupka, lead author of the report and vice chair of the IUCN Marine Turtle Specialist Group (MTSG). ‘They demonstrate that green turtle populations and presumably the green turtles’ ecosystem roles can be recovered in spite of drastic population declines in the past.’ Hunting & Poaching
Despite this good news, hunting of turtles and poaching of eggs are still problems in some of the studied sites, including Tortuguero on the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica. David Godfrey, MTSG member and executive director of the Caribbean Conservation Corporation, commented, ‘In Tortuguero, the recovering green turtle population attracts millions of dollars in tourism revenue each year for the local community as tourists come to watch the turtles lay their eggs. Unfortunately, these same turtles are still hunted by the thousands when they swim to Nicaraguan waters in search of seagrass, so conservation efforts must continue.’

The full study has been published online in Global Ecology and Biogeography. This article will be published in the print version of the journal in an upcoming issue.