A Teacher Fellow on Dr. Jeffrey Seminoff's (National Marine Fisheries Service) and Dr. J. Nichols' (WILDCOAST) Black Sea Turtles of Baja project were the first to inaugurate web tracking of a loggerhead turtle's prodigious journey of 12,000 kilometers from her California feeding grounds to her nesting grounds in Japan. Thousands of schoolchildren monitored Adelita's progress via her satellite transmitter. The ripple effect on youngsters is immeasurable.
Careful analysis of stomach contents of captured black turtles and of food resources, metabolic and foraging data in Baja, California, Mexico, has established Bahia de Los Angeles on the Gulf of California as a critical feeding ground for juvenile and adult black sea turtles. The several thousands of hours Earthwatch volunteers have invested in the tracking black turtles with radio and sonic telemetry has shown that black turtles reside in this foraging area for years at a time, thus substantially increasing their vulnerability to getting tangled and drowning in local fishing nets. Moreover, these turtles require upwards of 20 years to reach sexual maturity after arriving at the Bahia de los Angeles feeding area-yet another fact learned through the meticulous data collection by Earthwatch volunteers. Alarmingly, the chances that a turtle can survive this myriad of threats for the two decades required to reach maturity are slim.
Earthwatch teams have also been on hand to help attach satellite transmitters to nesting leatherbacks on Costa Rica's Pacific coast. The data from these travelers have helped Drs. Frank Paladino (Indiana-Purdue University), James Spotila (Drexel University), and Richard Reina (Monash University) pinpoint that offshore long lines and fishing nets incidentally placed along the turtles' migration routes are the likely cause of a 40-percent mortality rate among nesting leatherbacks there. This is a sobering finding for biologists who can point to increased protection and productivity on certain major turtle nesting beaches. Protecting beaches is not enough: Unless and until the fishing industry makes adjustments, sadly, the fate of the Pacific leatherback is likely extinction.