California Wild Summer 2005 - Grupo Tortuguero

The Magazine of the CALIFORNIA ACADEMY OF SCIENCES

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Grupo Tortuguero
Bringing Baja's Turtles Back from the brink

barbara d. andrews

The tortugueros have returned to Loreto. They have come to this small town in Baja California on the Sea of Cortez for the seventh annual meeting of the Grupo Tortuguero—sea turtle conservationists. What started out as a gathering of some 45 people troubled by declining sea turtle populations on the peninsula has now grown into the region’s premiere grassroots conservation meeting.

Today, over 300 individuals representing 30 Mexican communities, plus academic institutions, government agencies, and nonprofit organizations in Mexico and the United States attend. They are here to meet one another, share knowledge, and communicate their message to the public. Revolution is in the air.

Among the tortugueros I see one who stands out among the rest. He has a long dark mane and a broad smile. I first met Julio Solís four years earlier while tracking, capturing, and tagging sea turtles in Baja California’s Bahía Magdalena. Solís grew up near Acapulco where his father worked as a fisherman. As a child, he thought of sea turtles as a good catch and a tasty meal. “I couldn’t care less about sea turtles; they were just the same as any other animal.”

Seri Leatherback Ceremony

After the Grupo Tortuguero conference closes, some of us accompany a group of Seri Indians to a remote spot along the Pacific coast where they will perform a four-day traditional ceremony for the leatherback turtle.

One of the few tribes never fully conquered by the Spanish, to this day the Seri live relatively secluded in northwestern Sonora retaining their Comcáac language and much of their culture. The Seri consider leatherbacks sacred ancestors to be revered and protected. But it has been over 20 years since the Seri have been able to perform their traditional ceremony because so few leatherbacks have been seen in the northern tip of the Sea of Cortez. Only 2,300 adult leatherbacks are thought to remain in the whole Pacific. The ceremony we are attending is to keep a hope and tradition alive for the turtles return.

Seven hours later, as Cleotilde, a Seri elder, sings, we are rushing down a dirt road somewhere north of Todos Santos because local biologists told us that they expect a leatherback nest to hatch tonight. We pull in to Agua Blanca just as the first leatherback hatchling breaks the surface of the sand. Cleotilde begins to cry and opens the ceremony with a song to the turtle.

Throughout the next four days Cleotilde teaches the ceremonial rites to younger Seri. We paint our faces, play Seri games, and dance as Cleotilde sings. As the sun sets on the third day our procession files off toward the beach, where we release nine leatherback hatchlings. The hatchlings make their way down to the sea, as birds fly overhead and gray whales breach just yards from shore as if responding to Cleotilde’s song.

Chris Pesenti is Co-Director of Pro Peninsula in San Diego.

He kept this attitude even as he worked as a panguero, or boat driver, for the Centro para Estudios Costeros or School for Field Studies (CEC-SFS), an international ecological research institute based in Bahía Magdalena. At SFS, students from across the globe monitor marine resources, including gray whales and sea turtles.

“I was always a rebel as a kid, and conservation was the last thing on my mind,” Solís says. But his outlook changed after he met Wallace “J.” Nichols, a sea turtle biologist and co-founder of the Grupo Tortuguero, whose message touched Solís’s heart. “There was something that I recognized inside of J. He was my soul brother–I was never the same after that.”

Solís not only took the sea turtle conservation message to heart, he took it directly to the community. “I’ve realized my role now, to lift others up, to make them the messengers–to do for others what J. did for me. On weekends sometimes, we put on drag races. I want to use the events to bring money to the community and promote sea turtle conservation.” While Solís’s outlook has changed, he hasn’t lost an ounce of style. “I’m still a rebel,” he says, “but now I’m a rebel for conservation.”

Over the past seven years, sea turtle monitoring teams from Grupo Tortuguero (now supported by Pro Peninsula, a San Diego-based nonprofit organization), have learned to monitor sea turtles by tagging, taking measurements of them, and recording their findings for science. Their 2004 monitoring meeting, held in sweltering August heat, was the first to include teams from sea turtle nesting sites.

Solís’s reported findings were alarming; only 14 turtles caught and tagged within 216 hours of effort in Estero Banderitas, while 271 turtles, the majority eastern Pacific greens, were found dead. From inspecting local community dump sites and beaches, Solís and his peers determined the primary cause of death: human poaching.

This year’s Grupo Tortuguero meeting adopted the theme “Revolución Tortuguera”—Sea Turtle Revolution. The concern for sea turtles is truly creating a revolution among many fishermen and their families. Speakers addressed a range of topics, from the threats to sea turtles—mainly illegal poaching and incidental capture from nets and longlining—to the relationship between sea turtle ecosystems and human health. Others talked about enforcement, and changes in public perception. Yet the heart of the meeting still consists of community conservationists like Solís, fishermen who come to tell about their work, the hurdles they face, and the gains they have made over the past year.

Another tortuguero to catch my attention is Cesareo “Charo” Castro. Castro grew up with an ingrained sense of appreciation for the wilderness and, aware of the growing environmental problems surrounding him, could only feel frustration. Then in the mid 1990s, he met with an eco-tourism outfit that needed local guides. They taught him kayaking, English, and more about the region’s natural history. He soon realized that he could use this new knowledge to help educate his community.

The plight of the turtles has definitely changed for the worse over the past decades. Castro reflects back to the years when the sea turtles would congregate at the mouth of Soledad near his hometown of López Mateos between March and June. “It was difficult to maneuver the pangas through the water. The turtles were in such a mass it was like a watermelon patch.” Today the pangueros have no trouble steering.

But local attitudes have proved tough to change. Three days before the meeting, Castro’s nearby relatives invited him to dinner. Though they knew he was an avid conservationist, they asked him if he would like to eat sea turtle with them. He declined, and everyone else watched as Castro ate a fish dinner alone.

Before leaving he asked his host if she ever ate sea turtle during Semana Santa (Holy Week). Catholic custom prohibits the eating of meat during Semana Santa so many Mexicans will eat sea turtles, believing they are fish. After she admitted she did, Castro explained to her that sea turtles are reptiles, not fish, have red meat, and do not always die right away when they are being butchered. She thought he was kidding. After Castro left, his relatives slipped out the back to eat illegal bowls of turtle soup.

Despite the difficulty Castro experiences trying to communicate the importance of conservation to adults, he has had success with local children and young pangueros in his hometown. They ask him for English lessons, and seek to imitate him in hopes of gaining some of the confidence necessary to lead whale watching trips and other ecotours. “I feel sometimes I’ve been an example for my home town,” he says.

Baja California’s Five Sea Turtles

Sea turtles have lived on the Earth an estimated 150 million years. Five of the world’s seven species of these charismatic reptiles come to Baja California to forage or nest: the leatherback (Dermochelys coriacea), loggerhead (Caretta caretta), Eastern Pacific green sea turtle, also known as the black sea turtle (Chelonia mydas), hawksbill (Eretmochelys imbricata), and olive ridley (Lepidochelys olivacea).

Four of the five species are considered ecologically extinct—their populations have fallen below levels needed to serve a useful role in their ecosystem. Only olive ridley populations show strong signs of recovery owing to the protection of their nesting sites, fast growth rates, and smaller size at maturity.

Barbara D. Andrews is Project Coordinator for the new California Academy of Sciences and a member of the Pro Peninsula Board of Directors.

The California Academy of Sciences helped support the 7th Annual Grupo Tortuguero Meeting.