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Marine Life & Conservation

Saving Leatherback Turtles

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Last summer I was sat on the cliffs at Pendeen in Cornwall watching the sea swell gently rise and fall over the rocks below. It was a still and bright sunny day with Fulmars circling along the cliff face and the occasional seal checking out the shallows for food. Just as I was thinking how it couldn’t get any better, nature did its thing and sent a giant Leatherback Turtle cruising 100meters out from the shore. It really was a giant too. Hard to guess its real size but it had to be at least 5-6ft long.

The leatherback is the largest of the marine turtles and gets its name from the black, leathery skin that covers its carapace.  Leatherback turtles are considered to be critically endangered by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN). Nesting females are often killed for their meat and their eggs are harvested. At sea leatherbacks seem to be particularly vulnerable to entanglement in fishing gear, especially long lines and gill nets.

It’s hard to describe how I felt watching this fantastic animal swimming to some unknown part of the ocean. I know I was smiling. It is hard to accept that one day soon, that turtle, along with its entire species, may be gone from this planet forever, never to return.

Larry McKenna is the founding director of S.O.L.O. (Save Our Leatherbacks Operation). I first heard of his work through MilaBooks.com and their Sea-Gram News Letter. The following is taken from the April edition of the Sea-Gram news letter.

Larry McKenna’s work takes him to the remote land of Papua, Indonesia, home to the Aboriginal Papauans, and site of the largest leatherback sea turtle nesting beach, about 18 kilometers long and up to 100 meters wide.

Larry describes the scene on the beach:

“The only illumination is a reflection of moon light on the white foam of a breaking wave. All is quiet, except the gentle lapping of the surf while we wait for a living dinosaur to exit the sea and laboriously climb the slope of the beach.

She will locate where she was hatched 12 or more years ago, repeating the 150-million-year drive to reproduce so the species may survive. Left alone, this ancient hatching process would continue unimpeded, but humans have introduced the spectre of extinction of this most valuable creature of the seas.”

eye-of-leatherback-turtle

The Eye of a Leatherback Turtle During Nesting Trance

When the leatherback selects her nesting spot and begins to dig a four-foot-deep nest, she goes into a trance and does not recognize any activity. Enlightened humans can approach and marvel at the amazing beauty nature provides.

leatherback-turtle

However, while she is in this egg-laying trance, the nesting female is in danger from other humans; those who would slit her throat and use her skin for handbags and fashion items, in addition to senseless killings, egg poaching, and trophy collecting.

Global warming poses another threat, as high tides drown nests and heat cooks the eggs in their shells.

Leatherback hatchlings are about four inches long and cannot crawl over a twig. Yet they must face a host of jungle predators at nesting beaches, such as wild pigs, dogs, salt water crocodiles, crabs, and pythons.

leatherback-turtle-2

Larry’s activities include relocating eggs from tidal nests into bamboo pens, and excavating the nests that hatched in the night to examine the remains and determine what happened to unhatched eggs.

In almost every nest he finds several comatose hatchlings, which ran out of air climbing upward to freedom. He places an unconscious hatchling in the palm of a guest’s hand and encourage him/her to give it “leatherback CPR” by softly blowing into its face and nose. Soon it begins to wiggle and wants to be set on the sand. All the volunteers have tears in their eyes because they have just given life to a leatherback baby which would have become crab food later in the day.

How you can help:

1. Should you wish to experience this truly exciting and memorable visit to the leatherbacks, along with some of the best diving in the world, please contact P.J. Campagna, a very dedicated foundation volunteer, for the details:

pj-campagna@comcast.net

2. Watch this short youtube video (which includes donation information), placing you right there on the nesting beach, but which also shows some of the ATROCITIES humans inflict on these gentle giants:

[youtube id=”ufD8jJgK2p4″ width=”100%” height=”400px”]

The above text, information, and photos are used with permission, from Larry’s article: To Touch A Dinosaur.

Marine Life & Conservation

Book Review: Into the Great Wide Ocean

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diving book

Into the Great Wide Ocean: Life in the Least Known Habitat on Earth by Sonke Johnsen

What an unexpected surprise! A book that combines a clear passion for the ocean with humour and the deft touch of a true storyteller. Johnsen gives a wonderful insight into the life of a deep sea marine biologist , the weird and wonderful animals encountered in this mysterious world, the trials and tribulations, in a way that makes you feel you have been sat at a table chatting about his work over a pint or cup of tea.

Even for divers, the deep blue open ocean can feel inaccessible. It is one of the least studied places in the universe. In this book that deep blue ocean and its inhabitants is brought to you with warmth and wit. And even the most well-read will come away with new facts and information. Johnsen’s goal is one that resonates throughout: Before we as scientists can ask people to preserve this important and fragile habitat, we need to show them that it’s there and the beauty of what lives in it. He does just that.

This is a book that combines the scientific with a deeply personal story. You feel what it is like to work out in the open ocean and get to know the animals that reside there. With descriptions that allow you to really imagine what it feels like being out there in the blue.

What the publisher says:

The open ocean, far from the shore and miles above the seafloor, is a vast and formidable habitat that is home to the most abundant life on our planet, from giant squid and jellyfish to anglerfish with bioluminescent lures that draw prey into their toothy mouths. Into the Great Wide Ocean takes readers inside the peculiar world of the seagoing scientists who are providing tantalizing new insights into how the animals of the open ocean solve the problems of their existence.

Sönke Johnsen vividly describes how life in the water column of the open sea contends with a host of environmental challenges, such as gravity, movement, the absence of light, pressure that could crush a truck, catching food while not becoming food, finding a mate, raising young, and forming communities. He interweaves stories about the joys and hardships of the scientists who explore this beautiful and mysterious realm, which is under threat from human activity and rapidly changing before our eyes.

Into the Great Wide Ocean presents the sea and its inhabitants as you have never seen them before and reminds us that the rules of survival in the open ocean, though they may seem strange to us, are the primary rules of life on Earth.

About the Author:

Sönke Johnsen is professor of biology at Duke University. He is the author of The Optics of Life: A Biologist’s Guide to Light in Nature and the coauthor of Visual Ecology (both Princeton). Marlin Peterson, who created original illustrations for this book, is an illustrator and muralist who teaches and illustrates in many styles and media. He also specializes in giant optical illusions such as his harvestmen mural below the Space Needle in Seattle, and his full portfolio can be found at marlinpeterson.com.

Book Details

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Hardcover

Price: £20.00

ISBN: 9780691181745

Published: 7th January, 2025

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Marine Life & Conservation

Double Bubble for the Shark Trust

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This week only – your donation to the Shark Trust will be doubled – at no extra cost to you!

The Shark Trust are raising vital funds for their Community Engagement Programme: empowering people to learn about sharks and rays, assisting the scientific community take action for elasmobranchs, and bring communities together to become ambassadors for change.

Every £1 you give = £2 for shark conservation. A donation of £10 becomes £20, £50 becomes £100! Help us reach our target of £10,000, if successful, this will be doubled to £20,000 by the Big Give.

Every donation makes DOUBLE the impact!

Monty Halls is backing this week of fundraising “Cousteau called sharks the “splendid savage of the sea”, and even through the more benign lens of modern shark interactions it remains a good description. The reefs I dived thirty years ago teemed with sharks, the perfect result of 450 million years of evolution. Today those same reefs are silent, the blue water empty of those elegant shadows. But hope remains that if one generation has created such devastation, so the next can reverse the damage that has been done. The Shark Trust are at the forefront of that fight.

Donate Here

To find out more about the work of the Shark Trust visit their website here.

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