Climate of Our Future

One sea turtle’s incredible journey and the revolution that followed

Ocean Conservancy Magazine, Spring 2007
Story by Andrew Myers

At Baja California, a few miles from shore where the land is just a thin ribbon on the horizon, the terns sometimes appear to walk on water. When you see their white feathers and bright orange beaks in the distance, you know you’re close. It’s the first sign that loggerheads are near, floating at the surface, basking in the sun. The terns betray the turtles by standing atop their heart-shaped carapaces as if clinging to the last dry land on the planet.

Loggerheads are not so easy to catch, not like the black turtles of Magdalena Bay. Or rather, they are not so easy to find. There aren’t many left. Once you spot one though, the catching is relatively easy. Steady the motor. Let the boat slip through the water. Stand slowly and dive. Just be sure to come up from behind. Loggerhead jaws can crush your arm like a pencil. Such are the perils of being a marine biologist studying the sea turtles of western Mexico.

Back in the late summer of 1996, Wallace “J.” Nichols was still a graduate student, a job as senior sea turtle scientist for the Ocean Conservancy still a decade off. J. had just hauled aboard his tiny boat a large female loggerhead. Adelita would be her name, after the daughter of a local fisherman.

As loggerheads go, Adelita was special. Upon her brown and yellow shell, J. would affix a book-sized transmitter that would telegraph her location and make her name known the world over. No Baja sea turtle had ever borne such a device. It would allow Nichols to track Adelita wherever she might roam for the next year or so, perhaps longer if the batteries could hold. On August 10, 1996, somewhere near Santa Rosalita, along the thin finger of land known as the Baja California peninsula, Adelita plunged back into the sea and a historic journey was on.

A riddle for the ages

Debate was then rife among scientists about the loggerheads of western North America. Specifically, where did they come from? Loggerheads love Baja California. They bide their time in Baja like so many tourists, floating around, soaking in the warm sun, feasting on the innumerable pelagic red crabs that thrive there. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of loggerheads can be found in Baja—and once there were millions—yet no one had ever located a single nesting beach anywhere along the miles and miles of twisting Baja coast.

Some experts speculated that there might be a secret beach somewhere. As Adelita paddled gracefully away that day, Nichols wasn’t quite sure what secrets she and her transmitter might reveal, but he had a guess. As he looked west out over the blue expanse of ocean, he wondered if these magnificent reptiles might somehow traverse the entire Pacific from the well known nesting beaches of Japan, some 7,000 miles away, and back again.

“We knew that mature sea turtles always return to the beaches where they were hatched to nest as adults,” says Nichols. “With no nesting beach nearby, we thought that the juvenile loggerheads must migrate from Japan all the way across the Pacific, feeding and maturing off Baja before returning. Genetic studies support this hypothesis.”

In the coming months, Nichols tracked Adelita due west out of Baja. It wasn’t long before word of her journey got out. Schoolchildren and turtle-lovers the world over began to follow her movements as posted on Nichol’s Web site. She made a steady pace of about 20 miles per day; a healthy walking gait for you or me. By January 1, she was just north of Hawaii, making good time. From there, the track continued west and ever so slightly north. Sure enough, she was headed straight for Japan. On August 13, 1997, three hundred and sixty-eight days after she first plunged into the Pacific with a transmitter on her back, Adelita’s signal finally went dark—her last location put her near Sendai in northern Japan.

Changing the face of science

Sea turtle science has changed a great deal since then. Prior to 1996, metal flipper-tagging was the main way to track turtle migration. But with a metal tag all you know is point A and point B—a turtle that was once there is now here, nothing more. Satellite tracking was then a nascent technology. It held great promise, but it was expensive and tricky to do in the water. Think of your cell phone in 1996; unwieldy to say the least. The questions were many. How long would the glue hold? Will the battery last? Can the transmitter survive in the salty sea? All these questions and more were laid to rest when Adelita reached Japan.

Nichols and his team have tracked over fifty turtles since Adelita. The gear is now better, smaller, cheaper. The data provide a greater understanding of loggerhead and green turtle migrations and lifecycles. Eventually, he hopes to include tiny cameras or inject chips that can transmit biofeedback— body temperature, heart rate, respiration and other valuable information. Nichols and the Baja sea turtle team can even track dive patterns, watching when, where and how deep turtles descend in search of food or avoiding predators.

“Satellites have transformed the study of marine turtle movements at sea; where they spend 99.9% of their time. Right now, some 250 turtles are being tracked globally,” noted Dr. Brendan Godley, conservation biologist at the University of Exeter. “We are locating key areas for conservation and management, politically connecting the shared custodians of sea turtles while learning the secrets of these most charismatic animals. And, of course, we are reaching people. Seaturtle.org has seen 3 million visits to its animal tracking pages in the last two years.”

Scientists now know that loggerheads born in Japan spend the first few months of life adrift on the ocean, moving away from their nesting beaches. The lucky ones do anyway, the ones who make it to adolescence. Only a small percentage of hatchlings make it through the gauntlet that awaits them— foxes, crabs, and fishers’ nets, even the carelessly discarded plastic bag can be lethal when mistaken for a jellyfish, a favorite food.

Many young loggerheads will migrate east across the Pacific, moving both with and against the predominant currents in search of food. Less is known about this eastward trip. The youngest loggerheads are too small to be affixed with satellite tracking devices. Eventually, however, some of the turtles make it to Baja and once there they stay, grow large and fatten up for the long journey back. At this point, they are big, powerful swimmers—Adelita was 223 pounds—ripe for Nichols and other scientists to affix tracking devices. Before long, some unknown biological trigger, a hormonal surge perhaps, will let the turtles know it’s time to head home. And then, they are gone.

On the trip back, Nichols knows that turtles follow the ocean’s convergence areas, picking up as much help as they can from Mother Nature—and maybe some food along the way. Ever the masters of efficiency and resource, they make a near-straight shot across the Pacific often hitchhiking atop clumps of seagrass or other flotsam drifting in the currents.

Thinking globally

In the decade since Adelita, Nichols has witnessed a transformation of scientific collaboration, too. Once, sea turtle conservation was a relatively homegrown endeavor, transpiring on nesting beaches, mostly at night. There was no need to partner with or seek out scientists on the other side of the world because they had their own turtles to worry about. Groups of scientists, conservationists, and activists worked together locally to protect specific beaches or to reform fishing industries of the countries where they lived and worked. This work still continues today, but the playing field has expanded to include international partners who bring fresh ideas and knowledge.

“As it turns out, turtles aren’t local,” says Nichols. “We know now that the health of turtles in, say, Baja is closely tied to the health of turtles in Japan, and vice versa. To understand sea turtles everywhere, we must share data and collaborate globally. And, it’s not just a geographic concern. It’s interdisciplinary, too. We need to work with experts on mammals, birds, fish and invertebrates and other species to understand how all these populations work together as an ecosystem.

Acting locally

Nichols has long been an advocate of working with local communities to forward his conservation goals. He has been working with Baja fishermen to find economic alternatives to sea turtle fishing, an industry that blossomed in the middle of the last century, then crashed hard. Regulations came too late. Turtles virtually disappeared. Still, sea turtles are to the people of Baja a delicacy, and there is money to be made on the black market from their meat, shells and eggs.

In Baja, where a few dollars are enough to feed a family for a week, even modest economic incentives go a long way. Most recently, Nichols and his team have been working with local fishermen to promote ecotourism and a sea turtle refuge (see sidebar). There is a burgeoning interest in sea turtles. The local fishermen are skilled and knowledgeable guides and they can earn enough leading tourists to turtle “hotspots” to offset the potential money they might make on the black market or from fishing with deadly gillnets.

Journey’s end

No doubt, we owe a great deal to Adelita, but her exact fate is still a mystery. In 1997, after she reached the coastal waters of Japan, Nichols continued to receive sets of tracking points from Adelita’s transmitter, each set more peculiar than the next. The first coordinates fell in a scattershot pattern, inconsistent with those of a turtle making its way along a coastline, as one might expect to see. Then, a few weeks later, another set. This time, Adelita was moving again in a straight line but far faster than any turtle could possibly swim, on a direct path to the port of Sendai.

In 1999, Nichols trekked to Japan, GPS in hand, to see for himself the spot where Adelita first reached land. When the GPS clicked in to say he was at the exact point of Adelita’s arrival, J. looked up to find himself on the dock of a small Japanese fishing village, a fleet of squid boats lining the harbor.

Caveat ecotour

Sea turtles are fast becoming an ecotourism attraction for people who want to experience firsthand the magic of a nesting leatherback, a hatch that sends countless tiny turtles scrambling for the waterline, or a swim beside one of nature’s most beautiful, graceful animals.

Ecotourism can boost local communities by generating income in positive ways, offsetting black market trade in turtle meat and eggs or the need to overfish, while conserving local natural habitats. In addition to direct employment, ecotourism has a trickle-down effect on jobs in support businesses: restaurants, hotels, taxis and others. It thus becomes a powerful incentive for a whole community to preserve its natural resources—creating an economy where turtles are worth more alive than dead.

The downside of ecotourism is exploitation. Successful ecotourism takes careful planning and management to balance the oft-competing interests of economics and environment. Otherwise, something that starts as a good idea becomes yet another threat to biodiversity. For more information, please email SEE@oceanconservancy.org.