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 Editorials | Environmental | October 2007 
UCSC Researchers Helps Mexican Fishermen Save Endangered Sea Creature
 Alissa Poh - Santa Cruz Sentinel
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| | Baja California fishing grounds are favored by locals, and they overlap with rich turtle feeding waters. |
Loggerhead turtles are facing extinction — but not because of annihilation by huge factory trawlers plying the oceans.
A new study published in the Wednesday edition of PLoS ONE, and led by UC Santa Cruz graduate student Hoyt Peckham, shows that loggerhead turtles are 10 to 100 times as likely to die through small-scale Mexican fisheries off the coast of Baja California as from all of the industrial fishing fleets in the North Pacific Ocean combined.
"I really went there to study turtle foraging ecology," Peckham said of his research in Baja California. "I knew that bycatch was a problem"
It was the work of Wallace J. Nichols of the Ocean Conservancy, and the study's co-author, who was placing satellite trackers on turtles in Baja and watching them swim to Japan, that originally fascinated Peckham.
"How these animals migrate, why, what their cues are, what the energetics are behind it and so forth. [Instead] I got down there and spent months on shorelines with turtle carcasses," Peckham said.
The counting and measuring of these carcasses was, Peckham said, "an awful process", and "one of the most difficult times I've ever had."
That's the grim reality found in the study: Each year, off the coast of Baja California, more than 1,000 loggerhead turtles drown after getting entangled in the gill nets and long lines of local fishermen.
Baja California fishing grounds are favored by locals, and they overlap with rich turtle feeding waters. North Pacific loggerheads nest only in Japan, swimming across the Pacific as juveniles to mature in Baja California, a process that takes 30 years. Since they cluster at high densities off the Baja peninsula during this period, they appear plentiful to local fishermen. But records from nesting beaches in Japan show that loggerhead numbers have dropped 50 to 90 percent in the past decade.
According to Peckham's study, losing 1,000 or more adolescent turtles per year in Mexican waters alone would have far-reaching effects on breeding numbers.
Peckham and his research team systematically assessed the problem by conducting shoreline surveys, and observing fishermen at work, going offshore with them to see how many turtles were winding up in their nets.
"We also conducted a whole series of interviews," he said, "which is really hard work, especially in small fishing communities"
Peckham is also the founder of Proyecto Caguama, or Project Loggerhead, under the umbrella of Grupo Tortuguero, a Mexican nonprofit which, he said, is "a network of concerned citizens, scientists, managers, housewives."
Peckham encouraged local fishermen to participate in catching live loggerheads and tagging them with satellite transmitters. This adopt-a-turtle approach is popular, since fishermen take a personal interest in "their" turtle's movements, and avidly follow updates that Peckham and his colleagues share with them, he said. Hawaiian and Japanese fishermen also have been recruited to Mexican fishing villages on an exchange program, to share their experiences.
Peckham believes research efforts by loggerhead conservation experts ultimately need the Baja California fishermen's cooperation.
"I found, growing up among and working with fishermen, and working as a fisherman sometimes that fishermen are often some of the best scientists out there," said Peckham. "So engaging them in a formal conservation research process can be really fruitful"
Baja California fishermen have responded positively, Peckham said. They've turned a popular fishing locale into an off-limits "fishers' turtle reserve" Efrain de la Paz, owner of the area's biggest fishing fleet, has voluntarily stopped using long lines in turtle-rich waters.
Contact Alissa Poh at jcopeland@santacruzsentinel.com |
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