Saving giant turtles pulling in tourists

GRANDE RIVIERE, Trinidad - Giant leatherback turtles, some weighing half as much as a small car, drag themselves out of the ocean and up the sloping shore on the northeastern coast of Trinidad where villagers wearing dimmed headlamps wait in the dark. With their black carapaces glistening, the turtles inch along on the moonlit beach, using their powerful front flippers to move their bulky frames on the sand.

In years past, poachers from Grande Riviere and nearby towns would ransack the turtles’ buried eggs and hack the critically threatened reptiles to death with machetes to sell their meat in the market. Now, the turtles are the focus of a thriving tourist trade, with people so devoted to them that they shoo birds away when the turtles first start out as tiny hatchlings scurrying to sea.

The number of leatherbacks on this tropical beach has rebounded in spectacular fashion, with some 500 females nesting each night during the peak season in May and June, along the 875-yard beach. Researchers now consider the beach at Grand Riviere, alongside a river that flows into the Atlantic Ocean, the most densely nested site for leatherbacks in the world.

“It’s sometimes hard remembering that leatherbacks are actually endangered,” said tour guide Nicholas Alexander as he watched more emerge from the surf.

With instincts honed over 100 million years, the leatherbacks have migrated from cold North Atlantic waters in Canada and northern Europe to nest. The air-breathing reptiles can dive to ocean depths of more than 4,000 feet and remain underwater for an hour.

The resurgence of leatherbacks in Trinidad is touted by many as a major achievement, with more than half of all adult leatherbacks on the planet having been lost since 1980, mostly in the Eastern Pacific and Asia.

When conservation efforts started in Trinidad in the early 1990s, locals say a maximum of 30 turtles emerged from the surf overnight during the peak of the six-month nesting season. Now, at Grande Riviere and in the eastern community of Matura, where another major leatherback colony has grown, locals say more than 700 of the turtles appear overnight at the height of the season.

Flourishing turtle tourism is providing good livelihoods for people in formerly dead end farming towns, with the Trinidad-based group Turtle Village Trust saying it brings in some $8.2 million annually. The inflow of visitors, both domestic and foreign, to Trinidad’s northeast coast jumped from 6,500 in 2000 to more than 60,000 in 2012. Officials with the U.S.-based Sea Turtle Conservancy say Trinidad is now likely the world’s leading tourist destination for people to see leatherbacks.

Hopes are high that the tourism boom can help the creatures survive a slew of pressures. In a 2009 global study on the economics of marine turtle tourism, researchers from the environmental group World Wildlife Fund found that turtle tourism earned nearly three times as much money as the sale of turtle meat, leather and eggs.

Meanwhile, the Eastern Pacific leatherback population has collapsed to some 1,700 females, according to Aimee Leslie, marine turtle manager with the World Wildlife Fund.

The number of Atlantic leatherbacks has likely grown because of a variety of factors such as nesting beach protections, modifications of fishing gear in some places and increased public awareness, according to Jeanette Wyneken, a sea turtle expert at Florida Atlantic University. Leatherbacks may have also encountered growing stocks of the food that they depend upon, mostly jellyfish and gelatinous sea creatures called salps.

But for local fishermen, the six-month turtle nesting season from March through August is a hardship.

Ervan James, a veteran fisherman from Grande Riviere, recognizes that turtle tourism has been a boon for his village, but he and other fishermen are calling for the government to compensate them for not casting wide gill nets during the turtles’ nesting season. Perhaps anticipating being paid not to fish, the number of fishing boats at Grande Riviere has expanded from three a few years ago to about 20 now.

Since sea turtles must surface at regular intervals to breathe, they drown when entangled in nets. About 3,000 leatherbacks are snared off Trinidad’s nesting beaches each season, with about 1,000 of them drowning after getting caught in the net for an hour or getting their flippers hacked off by frustrated fishermen trying to untangle their damaged nets.

A looming and potentially greater threat is climate change. According to one modeling analysis, beach nesting sites for sea turtles in the Caribbean will come under significant danger because of beach erosion associated with sea level rise.

Even without such threats, the dangers are many. Experts have even long estimated that just one in 1,000 eggs will result in an adult turtle.

“These leatherbacks are the world’s last living dinosaurs,” said Alexander, the Grand Riviere tour guide, as three young apprentices learned to tag a nesting turtle’s flipper on the town’s beach. “We have to protect them for the next generation.”

Front Section, Pages 11 on 05/19/2013

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