Climate of Our Future

Ocean Conservancy

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.

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