The words “sea turtle conservation” never meant much to Max Miller. Last week, however, the 22-year-old helped hand-capture a 30-pound endangered green sea turtle so that it could be tagged and released near Virgin Gorda.
“The whole experience was super fun. Who doesn’t want to catch a turtle?” Mr. Miller said last Thursday after participating in an Association of Reef Keepers “turtle encounter,” which takes tourists and other non-scientists along on sea turtle research trips.
CFD officers came to think of turtle tagging as just another part of the job – not a particular favourite.
“We’d be out on a little boat in the sun and heat all day,” she said.
But the enthusiasm they noticed from others made them think that people would probably pay for the privilege of helping to tag turtles, which would raise much-needed funds for further research.
“When we did take other people out with us, they were just so excited,” Dr. Gore recalled, adding that a partner like ARK was needed before sea turtle research trips could become a paid excursion.
To judge from the grins on the faces of the participants, that sense of excitement is common for the guest-taggers.
“This is probably the funnest thing I’ve done on this whole trip,” said Rowen Short, 14, who was nearing the end of an eight-day sailing trip in the VI. “I liked actually catching them, bringing them onto the boat. Even chasing them was fun.”
Education
Messrs. Miller and Short didn’t start their day in the water, however. First, they heard a bit about the history of sea turtles from Dr. Gore.
In Christopher Columbus’ time, sea turtles were so abundant that sailors wrote about areas of the ocean being covered in them, she explained. Today, six of the seven remaining species of sea turtle are considered endangered, including the three species commonly found in the Virgin Islands.
While many turtles are protected from international trade through treaties, 16 Caribbean jurisdictions still allow turtle fishing, including the VI, which has a three-month season during which fishers can take green sea turtles with shells longer than 24 inchesand hawksbill sea turtles with shells longer than 15 inches, according to the VI Fisheries Act and the Fisheries Regulations. The law also states that leatherback and loggerhead turtles can’t be taken, and no nesting turtles or eggs can be disturbed.
Scientists began attempting to track turtle migrations by tagging them in the 1950s, Dr. Gore said.
“This was when we started to learn more and more about their life cycle,” she said.
Scientists learned that after a nestling went to sea, it would travel with some sargassum seaweed. From a nest in southern Florida, it might make it all the way to the Azores, near Portugal, before heading back to warmer waters again.
“When we tag a turtle, we know its individual identity,” Dr. Gore said. “When it’s recaptured, we know where it was first captured, we know how much it’s grown, how far it travelled — and it’s also a way to figure out how many turtles we have.”
The tagging project has shown that turtles tend to use the VI as their juvenile foraging grounds, and tend to move farther south when they mature. Tagging has also shown that sea turtles might travel quite a bit between their feeding, nesting and mating grounds.
“We had one turtle that was nesting here, and we found that it was going up to Puerto Rico to find a male turtle, then coming back here to lay eggs,” she said.
All this travel makes turtles tough to protect, Dr. Gore said.
“We have to look at it globally: You can’t take care of it in one individual country,” she said.
A further complication is that some communities rely on turtles for sustenance, and in others, such as the VI, turtle meat is a longstanding tradition.
“It’s a cultural practice: At Christmas you eat turtle,” Dr. Gore said, adding that enacting an outright ban on a tradition with such a long history would be an example of “top-down” management that often creates more problems for the population being targeted for protection.
The VI’s protection system can be improved, however, Dr. Gore said. A socioeconomic study on the territory’s turtle fishery is in the works, with a view toward creating a plan to phase out turtle fishing gradually.
One way to accomplish this goal without causing undue impact on fishers would be by granting non-transferable permits to the 10 or so turtle fishermen in the territory today, she said.
“Essentially, turtle fishing would end with them,” Dr. Gore explained.
On the water
After the presentation, it was time to get on the water. After travelling in a Dive BVI vessel to a sitenear Mango Bay, Virgin Gorda, known to be frequented by sea turtles, participants donned snorkel gear and were slowly towed through the water looking for the reptiles.
Mr. Miller spotted one early in the trip, but even with three others helping chase it down, the turtle got away.
“It’s surprising how fast they were – super quick,” he said afterwards. “The smaller ones, too: They were like torpedoes.”
After spotting another one that got away and about 45 more minutes of searching, Captain Casey McNutt steered the vessel to Little Dix Bay, a site with plenty of sea grass – green turtles’ favourite food.
This time the turtle taggers had better luck, spotting and chasing three turtles, and bringing in two that wore no tags.
The turtles were measured and described for a log, and they were outfitted with flipper tags and electronic microchip implants. Researchers in governments and universities throughout the region use the same system of tags and tracking, compiling data regularly, Dr. Gore explained.
Participants then took photos, named the two turtles, and carefully let them go.
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