Safe Havens for Turtles

Volunteer teams walk the beaches each night, looking for nesting turtles. It is an awe-inspiring sight to see this incredibly well adapted marine creature struggling to heave herself up on the beach to complete an eons-old ritual. When you find a nesting turtle, you identify her (or PIT-tag her if she appears to be a first-time nester), record the nest location, the weather, and the number of eggs laid. If the nest is below the high-tide line, team members move it up the beach and dig another nest. Later teams will help hatchlings reach the sea safely and dig up hatched nests to track hatching success and save any stragglers.

Other volunteer teams are needed to help turtle populations in Baja, Mexico and Barbados. Overharvesting and, more recently, poaching and incidental bycatch in fishnets have drastically reduced the black sea turtle and hawksbill population. Jeffrey Seminoff, for a fifth season with Earthwatch teams, is investigating the sex, age, seasonal movements, feeding patterns, and diet of black sea turtle populations in Bahia de Los Angeles. Researchers will help save this endangered species and determine which areas deserve protection as sensitive migration routes or as nursery areas for juveniles. Sleeping on cots, volunteers stay in thatched shade huts and palapas at the rustic beachfront Campo Archelon with showers, pit toilets, kitchen facilities, and lab space. The camp cook prepares meals featuring lots of seafood. Bahia de Los Angeles is a sleepy former mining town in a region that teems with dolphins, whales, seabirds, and desert oddities. If you can manage the heat and yearn to help endangered species, this project is an excellent choice.

When harvesting sea turtles was legal, the animals congregated in such large numbers here that fishermen caught 500 black, olive, and Ridley sea turtles in just 3 weeks. Though the Mexican government is now protecting the turtles' nesting beaches in Baja, the turtles fall prey elsewhere. To be effective, any sea turtle conservation plan must take into account the 99 percent of sea turtles' lives when they are not breeding and nesting. And that's exactly what Jeffrey Seminoff is investigating. A doctoral candidate at the University of Arizona, Seminoff is trying to find out the sex, age, seasonal movements, feeding patterns, and diet of black sea turtle populations in Bahia de Los Angeles. The Gulf of California serves as a major feeding ground for adult turtles, and, as teams discovered, is

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