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 arly
morning: A light breeze barely ruffles the waters in Banderitas Estuary.
Flashes of silver dart underneath the turquoise motorboat. Along the
shore, bright green mangroves dip their gnarled, entwined limbs into
and out of the water.
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| Photograph
by Jeffrey L. Brown. |
If someone knew where to look, it
would be relatively easy to spot sea turtles swimming and eating in
this calm arm of Magdalena Bay. On the Pacific side of Mexico’s
Baja California, it’s the perfect spot for a meeting on sea-turtle
research and conservation. Two Mexican fishermen point out where they’ve
recently seen turtles to Wallace J. Nichols M.E.M.’92, known
to everyone simply as “J.” Then they climb over the side
of their fishing boat onto Nichols’ newest research pontoon.
The vessel is a piecemeal affair. Nichols and some friends
fashioned it from an old boat that had been used in the winter and
spring to bring tourists out to see whales calving in the bay. He
noticed it lying dormant in a vacant lot and negotiated a good deal
with the owner. Atop the flat wooden boat, there’s a small stove,
coolers of food, a table with a radio, a cot, and boxes to store personal
belongings. Nichols, his Mexican assistant Adan Hernandez, and the
two fishermen pull up plastic chairs around an Igloo cooler, top it
with Nichols’ hard plastic equipment
case, and pull out a map of the region.
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| Nichols tags them for
migration and population research. |
In its own way, this is an official meeting, or
at least an introductory one. The fishermen head the cooperative that
recently received the rights from the government to control fishing
in part of the estuary. They had noticed Nichols’ research pontoon
floating in their area, and his work, while not threatening, excited
more than mild curiosity. The evening before, they stopped by the
American field school Nichols uses as his base in Puerto San Carlos.
Nichols told them about his most recent research project and its goals
and invited them to join him on the water this morning. They agreed.
He hopes to persuade them that Banderitas Estuary is the ideal site
for Baja’s first sea-turtle sanctuary.
Sea turtles are a crucial part
of food and culture in Baja California, despite Mexico’s ban
on killing and consuming the animals. Baja California is also one
of the most important Pacific feeding grounds for four species of
endangered sea turtles. These two facts are why Nichols has dedicated
his life to researching and protecting turtles in the area.
He started working with sea
turtles in 1992, but his fascination with turtles began back when
he was a child. “I always loved dinosaurs,” he says, “and
turtles are like living dinosaurs.” Sea turtles, in fact, appeared
on the planet about 150 million years ago, while dinosaurs roamed
the Earth. They survived to see humans invade their waters. But whether
they’ll continue to survive is the current urgent question: All
species of sea turtles in the world are endangered, faced with threats
from fishing nets, pollution, and hunters who prize them for their
shells, meat, and eggs.
This fascination with turtles
grew after Nichols completed his first graduate degree in natural-resource
economics at what is now Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment
and Earth Sciences. In 1992, he worked with the Caribbean Conservation
Corporation in Costa Rica on a nesting beach—walking the shoreline,
counting turtle eggs, and tagging turtles, and connecting with the
local community in developing a protection strategy.
With friend and colleague Jeff
Seminoff, Nichols wanted to continue working with these captivating
endangered creatures, so the two hatched a plan to visit all the turtle-nesting
beaches in Mexico. The next year, after beginning their Ph.D. work
at the University of Arizona, the pair packed up a truck and drove
for four months, visiting fifty-two research and conservation sites,
from Texas to Belize, from Guatemala to California. They met researchers
and concerned citizens and made contacts that would last into their
careers as turtle researchers.
TURTLES OF BAJA
The rich coastal waters off Baja California provide food for
four species of endangered sea turtles: black turtles, also
known as East Pacific green turtles; loggerhead turtles; olive
ridleys; and hawksbills. Leatherback turtles have one nesting
site near the southern tip of the peninsula.
Black turtles, which feed in bays and estuaries around the peninsula,
are one of the main species on which Nichols’ research
focuses. They nest in southern Mexico, in the state of Michoacan,
and swim more than a thousand miles to feed on algae, sea grass,
and occasionally invertebrates such as crabs. Most of the turtles
caught in Magdalena Bay are black turtles.
Out in the Pacific, loggerhead turtles migrate all the way from
Japan to feed on pelagic red crabs in the deep ocean waters
near Baja’s shores before returning to their natal beaches
to nest. Catching these turtles to study them is more difficult
than throwing out a net and waiting, as Nichols does to catch
black turtles in the bay. Instead, he travels miles out in the
Pacific on a small motorboat and searches for a small white
bird that rests on the backs of basking turtles. When he and
his assistants find one, they dive into the water and wrestle
the turtle over to the boat.
Of the two other species that feed near Baja, olive ridleys
are plentiful enough that Nichols says the need to study them
is not as urgent. But the numbers of hawksbills have dwindled
so significantly that scientific research is extremely difficult.
Olive ridleys, with their mottled green-gray carapaces, or shells,
have been recovering in Mexico due to beach protection and the
dynamics of their nesting sites and migration patterns. Like
the loggerheads, they spend time offshore in the deeper waters
of the Pacific.
Hawksbills live around the Pacific, but the ones that feed in
Baja come from nesting sites in Mexico. Populations of these
animals have been decimated because of their beautiful shells,
so finding one swimming in Baja’s waters today is extremely
rare. |
“It was kind of a reconnaissance
effort,” says Nichols. “It seemed like a setback in terms
of time, but invaluable in terms of education and contacts and friendships.
Looking back, it was a genius move—but at the time it just seemed
like a lot of fun.”
What he learned during these
travels was that Mexican biologists and researchers were doing a remarkable
job protecting turtles on their nesting beaches. The populations,
though, continued to decline, and Nichols saw that little research
effort was focused on the animals’ time in the water, where they
spend 99 percent of their lives. He decided this would be his focus,
and that he would concentrate on Baja California. “There were
some references to the area in earlier literature,” he says,
referring to a scientific paper written on Baja’s turtles and
the fishery in the 1970s. “There was some documentation on the
legal fishery. It was clearly an important feeding ground. But there
was not much contemporary research on the animals there. There was
clearly a big gap in both protection and knowledge of the animals.”
He went back to his Ph.D. committee
with a proposal to study Baja’s sea turtles. The committee, though,
was skeptical. They said the region had basically been fished out
back when there was a legal turtle fishery in the area, and that there
wouldn’t be enouanimals to conduct scientific research.
Nichols asked for a year in which to prove that a scientific
study was feasible. He went out in the Gulf of California with fisherman
Juan de la Cruz, who claims to have caught more than 3,000 turtles
with his harpoon. Together, as dawn broke, they caught a big black
turtle. “This convinced us that we could do it,” says Nichols.
“We could go out on the water and catch turtles. It wasn’t
a lot, sure, but it was one—I definitely felt like it was the
beginning of something.” He also worked with Antonio and Bety
Resendiz, at the time the only Mexican sea-turtle researchers in the
area, who had little funding or support from the Mexican government.
Nichols proved that there were enough turtles around to
conduct a scientific study. Since then, he has gone even further,
proving that Baja remains a vital feeding ground for four species
of endangered sea turtles and that, in fact, tens of thousands of
turtles still live in the region.
In the past, turtles swimming in the rich waters off Baja’s
coast numbered not just in the thousands, but probably in the millions.
The turtle fishing industry, once simply a part of life, became a
huge commercial export business in the Fifties and Sixties, but it
soon crashed. In the 1980s, the government tried to manage the turtle
fishery and limit the catch, but it was already too late. The number
of turtles continued to drop rapidly. In 1990, the Mexican government
banned the killing and eating of sea turtles altogether, even those
caught as by-catch or washed up dead on shore.
Despite the ban, communities
all over Baja continue to prize turtles as a delicacy. The region
today is likened to the American Wild West—and is just as difficult
to govern. Small fishing communities and slightly larger towns and
cities are separated by sometimes hundreds of miles of dry, dusty
roads. More than 2,000 miles of coastline wind in and out of inlets
around the peninsula. Only five government officials are responsible
for all resource-management enforcement in the southern half of Baja—everything
from poaching to forest management to protecting endangered species.
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“Scientific
research wasn’t enough. Now what we’re doing is a
lot of social sorts of things, understanding the economics and
policy issues as well as marine science.”
—Wallace J. Nichols |
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Nichols began his work by measuring, weighing,
and tagging all turtles he caught to study populations—figuring
out how big the turtles living there were, at what ages they arrived,
and how long they stayed in the region. He did DNA studies to provide
clues linking Baja’s turtles with specific nesting beaches. He
wanted to know exactly where the turtles were coming from and where
they were going, so in 1997 he and the Resendizes put a satellite
tag on a loggerhead turtle that a local named “Adelita.”
They tracked Adelita as she made her way all the way across the Pacific
to Japan. Nichols was so excited about what he saw that he had a friend
set up a turtle-tracking website
so that people around the world could watch Adelita’s journey
(www.cccturtle.org).
Scientists had long suspected that turtles born in Japan
make their way to Baja to feed, but his study was the first to prove
conclusively the Japan-Baja connection in detail. He also showed that
these turtles, upon reaching reproductive age, take months to swim
thousands of danger-fraught miles to their natal beaches.
As he continued his research, Nichols discovered something
else: Conservation on nesting beaches was working. More turtles were
able to safely lay eggs, and more of those eggs hatched, with more
hatchlings reaching the water. But if those turtles made it to Baja,
many of them never made it out again. “It’s kind of like
blocking off the kitchen door,” he says. “They come here
to feed, then they’re killed as they’re eating. They never
leave the kitchen.”
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