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Speaker 1
Welcome to the Resilient Earth podcast, where we talk with speakers from the United States and around the world about the critical issues facing our planet and the positive actions people are taking from the tiniest of actions to the grandest of gestures, so that we can continue to thrive and survive for generations to come. I'm Leigh Anne Lindsey, producer and host, along with co-hosts and co-producers Scott and Tree (Theresa) Mercer of Mendonoma Whale, and Seal Study located on the South Mendocino and North Sonoma coast.
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Speaker 1
The music for this podcast is by Eric Allaman, an international composer, pianist and a writer living in the sea rich. Discover more of his music, animations, ballet, stage and film work at Ericallaman.com.
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Speaker 1
You can find Resilient Earth on Spotify, Apple and Amazon podcasts, iHeart radio, YouTube, SoundCloud and wherever you find your podcasts.
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Speaker 2
Resilient Earth Radio podcast is brought to you by Flukes International Whale Tours. We are offering weeklong eco tours to the world's preeminent locations for whales at the very best times of the year. Stay at world class resorts and go out on the ocean. When the weather is beautiful and the seas are calm. Come see whales breaching, feeding and diving deep and learn from marine mammal experts.
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Speaker 2
Find us at Fluke Whale tours.com.
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Speaker 1
Contact Zack Klyver at 207460 9575 or email him at fluke whale Tours at gmail.com. In this episode, we speak with Brad Nahill, the president of the organization, SEE Turtles, and note that it is spelled SEE Brad has worked on sea turtle conservation, eco tourism, and environmental education for 20 years. For these efforts, he received the prestigious Changemakers Award for the World Travel and Tourism Council in 2019 on behalf of the organization Sea Turtles.
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Speaker 1
Brad is the editor and lead writer of Sea Turtle Research and Conservation Lessons from the field, published in 2020, and he's a coauthor of the Worldwide Travel guide to Sea Turtles, published in 2014. He is a National Geographic Explorer, was awarded the President's Award for his work as the chair of the Awards Committee of the International Sea Turtle Society, has authored several book chapters, blogs, and abstracts on turtle conservation and eco tourism, and has presented at major travel conferences and sea turtle symposia.
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Speaker 1
Brad has a B.S. in Environmental Economics from Penn State University, and has taught eco tourism at Mount Hood Community College in Oregon. He has been director of Sea Turtle since its founding, and became president after the organization became an independent, nonprofit organization in 2016. This conversation is a lead up to the annual Sea Turtle a week each June, which kicks off this year with World Ocean Day, June 8th and ends on the 16th with Sea Turtle Week.
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Speaker 1
Seven sea turtle species are highlighted each day, along with one of the threats that they face. Join Brad Narwhals sea turtle organization, Save the Sea Turtle Foundation, and more than 150 global partners in raising awareness for sea turtles and our ocean planet. World Sea Turtle Day would not be rightfully celebrated without mentioning Doctor Archie Carr, Sea Turtle Conservancy's founder and father of sea turtle biology.
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Speaker 1
World Sea Turtle Day is celebrated the same day as Doctor Carr's birthday. His research and advocacy brought attention to the threatening conditions that continue to impact sea turtles today. His work highlighted the issues and helped create the community that continues to strive for a better life and future for sea turtles around the globe. Brad Nahill's organization has expanded to support 50 turtle nesting beaches globally.
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Speaker 1
Brad also mentions their conservation Tourism program, which offers hands on experiences for travelers and specialized tours around the world for educational institutions, all while promoting sea turtle conservation. I’m Leigh Anne Lindsey. Host and producer. And I want to thank you for listening to and supporting Resilient Earth Radio and podcast.
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Speaker 1
Welcome to Resilient Earth Radio and podcast, Brad.
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Speaker 3
Thank you. I'm excited to be here.
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Speaker 1
It's good to meet you and Scott and Tree Mercer with Mendonoma Whale and Seal Study have dedicated their lives to watching and tracking whales. And Scott had a big tourism business with whales, too. I wonder first, I thought it would be good for you to give us an idea of the organization, the scope of it, and how long it has been around.
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Speaker 3
Sure. Yeah. We started Sea Turtles in 2008. I launched it, co-founded it with, good friend and mentor. Doctor Wallace J. Nichols, who is, from California as well. Unfortunately, we lost him last year (June 10, 2024) so we're still remembering him and thinking a lot about him. So you're probably hear me talk about him at some point, but we started the organization together in 2008 under the, nonprofit Ocean Conservancy, based in Washington, DC.
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Speaker 3
And the original idea was to support sea turtle conservation programs in Latin America through conservation travel. So bringing people to go work hands on with these animals in ways that help the animals and help the communities, bring in resources to the conservation work, provide volunteer support to them. So that's what we started doing in 2008. Over the years, we have grown to include a number of other programs.
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Speaker 3
We now also raise funds for sea turtle nesting beaches around the world. So right now we're supporting about
Load full transcript
50 different turtle nesting beaches, providing small grants so that the local community organizations have the resources to pay people to walk up and down the beach, make sure the nest are protected, the adults are protected, getting the hatchlings into the water.
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Speaker 3
We also have a program that works on helping communities get plastic waste out of sea turtle habitats, either the beaches or nearshore waters. As you guys, and probably a lot of your listeners know, plastic is a really big problem for sea turtles in particular, and there's not a lot of resources to really help address those. So we provide funding for these small coastal communities to do infrastructure work, to build out ways that they can recycle their waste on site.
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Speaker 3
You know, even here in the United States we’re recycling less than 10% of our plastic and in these, you know, developing countries with very little solid waste infrastructure, it's a very challenging problem.
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Speaker 1
Yes, we've done several episodes now on plastics, and our last one was with Suzanne Brander, who's with the Scientists Coalition. That's advising the United Nations on that global treaty on plastics that got extended this August in Geneva. Yeah, this is a major problem. So we're right there with you on that.
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Speaker 3
Yeah, it's a huge one and one that we have to work on from that global scale all the way down to the local communities. That really affects people, animals, everything at every level, all the way down to the microscopic. We also have a program that fights the tortoise shell trade. So that's the trade. And the shells of hawksbill sea turtles that are turned into jewelry and different things in different places around the world.
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Speaker 3
And we have a program that supports emerging leaders in coastal communities in the global South, trying to help build capacity in some of these communities to manage their programs locally. Because a lot of the work is managed by international NGOs or ones based in the capital cities, and not by the people who live closest to these animals. So it's quite a range of things that we do.
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Speaker 3
But that's kind of the overview there.
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Speaker 1
How many people are in the organization?
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Speaker 3
Right now there are three of us. We're a small organization, and we have a board of six.
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Speaker 2
That's manageable.
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Speaker 3
Yeah. Yeah.
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Speaker 1
And how do you get connected with those communities?
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Speaker 3
Initially, we were connected from these communities through the work that I, myself and, Doctor Nichols have done working in the field in Latin America. I spent a couple of years working in Costa Rica. He spent, several decades working in different parts of Mexico. And the two of us developed a bit of a network in Latin America, you know, going to the international meetings and meeting the folks in the field.
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Speaker 3
So we started with the folks that we knew, who we knew were doing a good job, that just needed a bit more support. And so since then, we have developed, a number of processes to bring on new partners. We have a full application process, we have advisors. And, you know, we still attend international meetings to help grow the networks of groups that we work with.
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Speaker 1
And I like the way you have a play on words with the spelling of your organization as SEE turtles, with the tourism that you've got intertwined in the work that you do, and you are doing conservation tourism in a couple of different countries, you want to talk a little bit about that, and then I'd like to bring in Scott and Tree to ask some of their questions too.
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Speaker 3
Of course. So yeah, our original mission was supporting sea turtle conservation through travel. And so we do that by running trips that people can join to go and work hands on with the local conservation efforts. So we take people to Costa Rica, a couple different places in Mexico. We've also added in a few other places Belize, Panama, Galapagos, Cuba and we've taken people to other places, but those are the full range that we're working with right now.
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Speaker 3
And I also just completed a scouting trip to Kenya, where we're going to do our first trip to Africa starting next year. So it depends on the location. But in these places, people can either help work on a nesting beach or you're helping to monitor the beach, walking up and down the beach looking for the nesting turtles. When there are turtles, you can help the biologist collect the data, measuring them, things like that.
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Speaker 3
When they're hatchlings, you can help release them to the water. We'll always do beach cleanups if necessary, and then in some other places where there isn't as much nesting, for example, like in Belize or in Galapagos, we are doing in-water work. So that might be like in the case of Galapagos doing photo identification. So taking pictures of the turtles and uploading them to a database so that researchers have a better sense of what turtles are, where or, you know, having people catch turtles in the water to study them and release them.
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Speaker 1
Our turtles ever tagged, tagged to study their movements, for example?
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Speaker 3
Yes, most of the groups that we work with do multiple types of tagging. There are flipper tags or little metal tags. The most common way attached to their flippers, so that when they if they go to a different place, that people can identify them. Some places also use, what are called pit tags, which are like basically like little barcodes
that are injected into them.
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Speaker 3
And then yeah, never. The groups that we work with also do satellite tagging. So gluing a tag to the shell so that they can track their movements on their, on their migrations.
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Speaker 1
Excellent. The idea of your trips, it's real involvement with the turtles is is not just to take a look at them. I'm so impressed with the opportunity to, like you said, walk the beaches, protect the nesting sites, clean up the beaches. That is such a great opportunity. Do you get lots of people who are interested in this type of a and have an adventure?
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Speaker 3
Yeah. Our tours program is really growing. Most of our trips have been selling out. You know, it's still a fairly small program this year. We'll probably have 100, 120 or so travelers, but we are going to be moving soon more into student travel, which we think is a real potential growth area for us. And so where possible, we try to offer as much hands on work as we can now in places like Galapagos has very strict guidelines and regulations around that.
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Speaker 3
We can't do any touching of them. So that's why we're doing the photo ID, but that's in conjunction with local researchers. And so yeah, the trips are really a variety. Some are real hands on where you're staying in a rustic research station, there's going to be bugs and rain and, and, you know, you're you're going to have to, you know, put up with some challenges.
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Speaker 3
But it is real work that has a real great impact on the turtles and the communities. As well. And then other trips are more observation and education, but still bring in money to the communities and to the conservation work. You know, we feel like, you know, in a lot of places, the conservation. Yeah. I don't know if you guys are familiar with the term colonial conservation, but in a lot of places, the way that the history of conservation worked is Western scientists came into an important habitat for an animal, convinced the government to close the area off, often move people out and restrict people from being able to eat the turtles eat their eggs, which
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Speaker 3
is obviously it's good for the turtles, but it can create a lot of conflict with the communities and in many cases has not respected local customs, local cultures and in some cases, places where these things were done fairly sustainably. So the reason that we launched sea turtles was as a way to support these communities that are affected by that, that have reduced economic opportunities because they can't sell the turtle meat or the turtle eggs to bring in income to these communities so that they can thrive while the sea turtles thrive as well.
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Speaker 3
You know, and we've always felt that in many cases, that money going into the communities is actually more valuable to the conservation efforts
than the money going directly to conservation, because we've seen communities transform from ones based on consumption of sea turtles and their eggs and parts and things to ones that are dedicated to their conservation. Because of these economic opportunities.
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Speaker 1
You're really building an economy around those natural resources.
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Speaker 3
Yeah, that's the idea. Yeah, yeah.
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Speaker 2
Yeah, that's exactly one question. I was going to ask you what the concentration is when you get a group down there. When I was taking people down to the British Virgin Islands, the draw was for our advertising was on humpbacks and coral reefs. Once we got there, it was turtles and then the grassland areas where we took them snorkeling...rainforest and into the community to meet people.
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Speaker 2
We did talks in schools where electricity would go on and off. And you know what that's like down there... so yeah, once you get in there, it becomes very multifaceted very quickly.
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Speaker 3
Yeah, absolutely. You know, we find that sea turtle conservation and research doesn't really happen in a vacuum. It's affected by everything that's happening around that. So in Costa Rica, for example, there might be a banana plantation right next to the turtle nesting beach. Or there might be, you know, a big hotel that has lights on the beach and furniture, things like that.
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Speaker 3
And so, you know, we really need to look at the bigger picture of when we're protecting the turtles and all the other economic activities that are happening in the area, so that the programs can be developed in a way that are beneficial to the communities, but not negatively impacting the sea turtles. And so, yeah, it involves education, it involves culture, it involves everything.
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Speaker 2
Something I was going to mention with trying to educate the public was down in Florida getting people to turn their spotlights off at night. They like to light the beach up like it's noon in front of their cottage down there. And, you know, that's a big problem getting them to turn the lights off.
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Speaker 3
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Lights are a problem for sea turtles in a number of ways. The bright lights can deter the females from coming ashore because they're obviously very vulnerable when they come out of the water to predators. And the lights, conversely, with the hatchlings, attract them. So in places where there are lights behind the beach, overhead street lights, they can attract the hatchlings inland.
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Speaker 3
So there is multiple ways that the lights affect the turtles. So yeah, there's a number of communities that have done a really great job at encouraging people to turn off the lights during nesting season, bringing in regulations. I remember there was a controversy at
one point. I think it was, Rush Limbaugh, the late famous radio host who was not happy that he had to turn his lights off at night.
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Speaker 3
So, yeah, but there are some really great programs and organizations working in Florida to do that. We work quite closely, often with the Sea Turtle Conservancy, who are based in Florida, who have a great beach lighting program, and there's a number of localities that have replaced the overhead street lamps with ones on the ground that don't attract them, or places can use red or orange lights that are not quite as bright and as much of a deterrents for the turtles.
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Speaker 3
So yeah, there's a lot of different issues that they face, and it's really very site specific, which ones are affecting the turtles, in which location.
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Speaker 2
Yeah, occasionally I used to turn one of his radio shows on if I was on a long drive, just to see how outraged I could get in a short amount of time, and I could hear, I did hear one on one of those where he was going on a rant about having to turn the spotlights off at night.
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Speaker 2
He actually would spend a half an hour going on and on about that.
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Speaker 1
Hey Brad, can you talk about the variety of turtles, sea turtles that there are in the world?
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Speaker 3
Sure, yeah. There are seven species of sea turtles around the world, which I feel pretty lucky working with turtles because I know a lot of other than animals, there's dozens or hundreds that one might have to learn, but seven is definitely a very manageable number. So those are the leatherback, loggerhead, green turtle, hawksbill, Kemp's ridley, olive ridley, and flat back.
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Speaker 3
So those are all the different kinds of turtles that you can find around the world. Globally. Two of them right now are considered critically endangered. And so that's the Kemp's ridley, which is found in the US primarily around the Gulf of Mexico and in northern Mexico. We had sea turtles still call it the Gulf of Mexico. That is still the name.
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Speaker 1
Yes.
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Speaker 1
We agree. (small laughter)
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Speaker 3
Yes. And the hawksbill sea turtle is also considered critically endangered. They're the ones that are affected by the tortoise shell trade that I mentioned. Although, there is some good news around that species because the international legal trade in hawksbill shells was ended in the 1990s, and we've started to see a recovery in a number of places around the world since that has officially ended.
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Speaker 3
Now it still happens illegally in a number of places, including Latin America and Asia in particular. But then the green turtle is listed as endangered. Although their numbers are doing pretty well worldwide, their numbers are going up in most places
and then the loggerheads and leatherbacks are both considered vulnerable. But the reality behind that is and so I just came back from a couple of weeks ago from the International Sea Turtle Society meeting that happened this year in Ghana, in Accra, that some of the newest research that's coming out is showing that in reality, Leatherbacks are facing a really, really difficult time and that maybe the they were changed 15 or 20 years ago from
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Speaker 3
critically endangered to vulnerable. And that might have been at a hasty change. And they may be upgraded again here at some point. And then the, flap back is listed as data deficient, which means we don't really have enough data. Although in Australia where they're found, they are listed as endangered. And then the olive ridley is also considered vulnerable.
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Speaker 2
And what natural markers do you use? In photo identification and cataloging when you don't have a tag on, what natural markers do you use?
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Speaker 3
It's the pattern of scoots around the eyes. They are all unique. And so there are algorithms I that when you take a picture can look at how that pattern is formed and the different shapes of the scoots around the eyes to identify them. Another marker is with the leatherback turtle in particular. They have a white spot on their forehead that is actually some people call it kind of, nature's GPS kind of thing, because there is basically like a very thin part of their skull behind that.
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Speaker 3
And so when they surface, they can see the position of the sun. And it kind of gives them a sense of, of where they are in the ocean. But those are very unique as well. So those can be kind of a fingerprint as well. Scott replies, “Okay.”
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Speaker 1
(Tree) That's fascinating. Wow.
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Speaker 2
(Scott) Another question I was wondering about. How effective do you think the TEDs have been?
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Speaker 3
Yeah. Turtle excluder devices have been very effective. Now, where they haven't been as effective is whether the fishermen are using them. And so for the folks who don't know what a Ted is, it was, an invention by a shrimp fishermen from the southeastern United States, a shrimp fisherman who wanted to devise a way to catch shrimp without catching turtles.
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Speaker 3
And so what the Ted does is that there is a metal grate that goes across the mouth of the net. And then there is an opening kind of an escape hatch at the bottom of the net. So as the shrimp pass through, you know, they're small enough to pass through the grate and stay in the net, whereas the turtle hits the metal grate and gets pushed out the bottom.
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Speaker 3
And, you know, different organizations have come up with different variations on it around the world, but it is required by fishermen in the United States to use
them. And it's one of the reasons, I think one of the biggest reasons, honestly, why sea turtle numbers in the U.S are growing pretty rapidly, and we have now have one of the most important loggerhead nesting beaches in the areas in the world, the southeastern United States, primarily Florida.
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Speaker 3
The green turtle numbers in the U.S, primarily, again, Florida, are growing tremendously and we have a good number of leatherbacks as well. And so the the requirement of the turtle excluder devices has helped save the lives of lots and lots and lots of sea turtles. One of the interesting things that happened, I wasn't involved in conservation when it was passed, but there was a lot of opposition by the fishing industry.
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Speaker 3
It was a good friend of mine and mentor of mine named Mary Del Donnelly, who at the time with Ocean Conservancy was one of the people who helped get that legislation through despite getting death threats from the fishing industry. Once it was passed, though, the fishermen then approached the conservation community and said, well, now we're at a disadvantage because other countries can fish without them and there is some debate around this, but the fishermen do lose some portion of the catch at the holes at the bottom.
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Speaker 3
You know, if you ask a fisherman, they might say a certain amount, 20 or 30%, whereas some of the trials and some of the conservationists might say it's, you know, less than ten, but there is some. And so they felt that they were at a disadvantage to countries that didn't require that. So they actually got on board and helped pass in the US legislation that required any country that we import shrimp from to also require turtle excluder devices.
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Speaker 3
And so. Well, I will say for the moment, we still have a program where people from the US government will go to these different countries and do inspections on the fishing net. Unfortunately, I think it's probably pretty likely on the chopping block if it hasn't already been like pretty much every other international or wildlife conservation effort or anything environmental related, unfortunately, as you might imagine, is a really challenging time for this community.
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Speaker 3
(Leigh Anne) Yes. (Brad) But yeah, it's it's been huge for protecting sea turtles around the world.
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Speaker 2
(Scott) Well that's good. I remember the shrimpers complaining, well not complaining, but remarking that they had huge clouds of pelicans and terns behind their boats picking up shrimp that were coming out through the, escape hatch you were talking about.
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Speaker 3
Yeah.
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Speaker 1
And some of the other negative impacts on turtles like climate change. We were talking with Doctor Judith Weiss from Rutgers University. She's, professor emeritus from there. But she had
mentioned something that we hadn't known before. But then I just heard it again at the International Ocean Film Festival in San Francisco. But it's how the temperature can affect the actual sex of the turtle.
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Speaker 1
Is that correct?
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Speaker 3
The temperature of the sand.
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Speaker 1
(Leigh Anne) The sand? Oh, ok.
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Speaker 3
Yes. So all reptiles, when their eggs are laid to reptiles, lay eggs. And the sex of that, whatever it is, you know, could be crocodile or turtle or other animal is determined by the temperature of where it is in the nest. What we call the pivotal temperature where sea turtles, it's kind of species specific, but it's high 70s, low 80s, and Fahrenheit and around that number, the nest should be around 50, 50 male, female.
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Speaker 3
But with climate change and rising temperatures, the beaches, the temperature of the sand is rising. And there have been studies in Florida and Australia looking at the sex of the hatchlings that are being born and and in both cases, as much as 99 or 100% of them are female. So higher temperatures result in females. And so that's a big problem, as you might imagine.
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Speaker 3
We will obviously want a balanced population for future growth. So while we are seeing a lot of really good news in sea turtles and sea turtle populations in many places rising and recovering, this is a long term thing that we're very concerned about, because if these beaches are only producing females, then in 20 or 30 years, when these hatchlings become the next reproductive population, we're not going to have many males to reproduce with.
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Speaker 3
So it is a really scary thing. There are things that we can do that a lot of beaches do to manage that, like putting shading over them and having, you know, data loggers, temperature loggers, like basically thermometers in the nests so that we can try to manage and keep them around that temperature. But, you know, when you're talking about a huge beach, like there's a beach in Mexico that we work with that gets 85,000 nests in a season, and they'll bring a few of them to a hatchery and shade some of them.
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Speaker 3
But you can't shade an entire beach of 80,000 nests to make sure that that's happening. But climate. Yeah, climate affects sea turtles in a number of ways. Not just that coral reefs are major sea turtle habitats, and so rising ocean temperatures are causing coral bleaching, sea level rise. You know, sea turtles nest on beaches. With rising sea levels,
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Speaker 3
we're seeing a lot of erosion and inundations of sea turtle nesting beaches. So climate is a is a huge problem for sea turtles in a number of ways.
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Speaker 2
While we're talking about the numbers of them, uh, can you tell us a little more about the Billion Baby program you have?
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Speaker 3
Sure. Yeah, that's a really fun one. Yeah, we call it Billion Baby Turtles. And that was an idea by our late co-founder Jay Nichols. I remember the day he came to me with that and he said, can we save a billion hatchlings? And I was like, well, that's ambitious (group laughter) How do we how do we go about doing that?
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Speaker 3
And he said, well, let's find out how much it cost to save a baby turtle. Do you know how much it costs? And I said, I don't know, probably depends on the place, but let's find out. So we went to some of our colleagues working on nesting beaches around the world, and we just gave them a very simple challenge.
00;30;46;20 - 00;31;10;05
Speaker 3
We said, what's your budget and how many hatchlings do you have in an average season? So you divide that and tell us roughly what it cost to save a baby turtle. And so then we took that from, you know, ten or so different beaches. And the number that came out to was about two hatchlings per dollar. So about $0.50 per hatchling.
00;31;10;05 - 00;31;32;28
Speaker 3
And that's actually not a bad idea. Not a bad way to frame it because people want to know the impact of their donations. And so we started this program with this goal of saving, a billion hatchlings. And it's become our biggest program. It's been around for about ten years. It's the one that I mentioned where we're working with about 50 different nesting beaches.
00;31;33;01 - 00;31;57;19
Speaker 3
And as we've expanded and brought on a handful of bigger beaches, including that one in Mexico with 85,000 nests, they have about 5 million hatchlings a year themselves. What the amazing thing that we've seen since we've started this program is that beach has recovered dramatically, to the point where the biologist believes that they're at potentially at pre-human exploitation levels.
00;31;57;21 - 00;32;19;29
Speaker 3
So they were at tens of thousands of nests into the ‘40s, ’50s, ‘60s, but people were eating the turtles, eating the eggs to the point where they dropped to 500 nests in 1999. There's a university, University of Michoacan there in Mexico, started working with the indigenous local indigenous community, the Nawa, in the early 80s to start protecting their turtles.
00;32;19;29 - 00;32;40;20
Speaker 3
But the numbers kept going down, even though Mexico outlawed the consumption of turtles and they started protecting them in the in the 80s. But by the 90s they were almost gone. But in 2000, they started recovering again. And those turtles that they were working with in the early 80s were growing up and starting to return. So their numbers have gone up exponentially.
00;32;40;20 - 00;33;05;00
Speaker 3
So from 500 nests to 80 some thousand now in a little over 20 years is an extraordinary recovery. And because of that particular beach, it now costs less than $0.10 per hatchling. So now it's ten for a dollar. And so when we work with
different businesses or if people want to donate, we say for every dollar you donate, we can save at least ten hatchlings.
00;33;05;00 - 00;33;28;05
Speaker 3
It's hard to say it's more than that now. But we keep that as a nice round number. And so we are about to pass 20 million hatchlings saved, which is very exciting. We're making our first grants of the year now and should be passing that number here pretty soon. And so I like to joke, you know, we're still, you know, 980 million hatchlings away from from our billion goal.
00;33;28;05 - 00;33;55;16
Speaker 3
But every year we're protecting more. Last year was around 6 million. And so, you know, we're we're accelerating that number. We're bringing in new beaches every year and new partners, new business partners, schools. Our tours help fund that program. So we're really excited, enthusiastic about that program. And it's really making a big difference for a lot of communities around the world, because what we see is that these communities work on these nesting beaches.
00;33;55;16 - 00;34;15;19
Speaker 3
They don't need a ton of equipment. They don't need a ton of staff. They don't have high paid staff. For a few thousand dollars, they can protect the turtles that are nesting their beaches every year, and especially now when a lot of the conservation funding is being cut, these small grants can have a really big impact in these communities.
00;34;15;21 - 00;34;20;27
Speaker 2
What is the survival rate of the hatchlings per thousand? It's like one out of how many?
00;34;21;00 - 00;34;47;29
Speaker 3
So the sea turtle community most commonly uses yeah, one out of a thousand. Now that's not based on the most robust science. I would say it's kind of a guess. We're actually just really now, or the conservation community is really just starting to get to the point where we can put tiny little transmitters on hatchlings to start seeing where they go, but we can't track a turtle for its entire lifetime.
00;34;48;02 - 00;35;17;08
Speaker 3
So our best guess is about one out of a thousand. Yeah, and that's under natural conditions, because they're eaten by just about everything. Crabs and birds and fish and people in a lot of places still eat the eggs. So it's tough life out there for a hatchling. But that's the reason why sea turtles lay so many eggs. An adult turtle can lay three, four, or 5000 eggs over its lifetime because so many of them are eaten.
00;35;17;08 - 00;35;37;15
Speaker 3
So people talk about what you need to reduce that natural predation. We see people say that on social media all the time. And what we say is, no, we're we're working on the human causes. Sea turtles have been around for more than 100 million years. With that, we believe that rate and there's a lot of animals who depend on sea turtles for food.
00;35;37;15 - 00;35;48;14
Speaker 3
They're part of the circle of life. So if we can keep that number to that natural rate and get out of the way, elsewise numbers can recover. And that's what we're seeing around the world.
00;35;48;16 - 00;36;04;23
Speaker 1
Yeah, the smuggling aspect too, in that component alone. And what you're doing with your app that you've been developing these last couple of years. I just downloaded it. SEE Shell and that’s S-E-E Shell talk a little bit about that and how that's helping.
00;36;04;26 - 00;36;30;00
Speaker 3
Yeah, that's something that we're really excited about and something groundbreaking that we did. Yeah. The SEE Shell app. What it does is it uses machine learning. So a form of artificial intelligence to be able to recognize illegal sea turtle products. So the pattern of the hawksbill turtle is pretty unique. So I'm sure a lot of your folks out there have heard of tortoise shell.
00;36;30;06 - 00;36;55;01
Speaker 3
You might have a cat that's a tortoise shell cat or, you know, a dress, or I have a pair of glasses that have that pattern. So that pattern has become ubiquitous. And so you're probably familiar with what it looks like. It's brownish yellow gold kind of mixture. And it's very beautiful pattern. And the name tortoise shell is actually a bit of a misnomer because it comes from a sea turtle, not a tortoise.
00;36;55;01 - 00;37;20;29
Speaker 3
But it was plastic before plastic was invented. It's been used for thousands of years because it is very malleable and very strong, and it can be basically, it's boiled and shaped into all different kinds of patterns. And it's been found in the libraries of Alexandria from thousands of years ago. It was used, you know, very, very commonly for a whole wide range of things.
00;37;21;01 - 00;37;44;11
Speaker 3
Now, this is one case where the invention of plastic in one particular way may have actually been a little bit helpful for sea turtles in that it could replace that so that we didn't have to kill hawksbill sea turtles to be able to use these. But now it's become difficult to tell the difference between a real tortoise shell and, you know, plastic resin.
00;37;44;11 - 00;38;09;06
Speaker 3
Or it can also be confused for a number of other things like horns, like cow horns, bone, coconut shell. If you're a traveler or or a law enforcement official that's tasked with reducing the illegal wildlife trade, it can be very difficult for you to be able to tell what is actually sea turtle shell and what is not. And so that's why we created this app.
00;38;09;06 - 00;38;35;02
Speaker 3
We worked with this brilliant data scientist named Alex Robillard, who developed this model. We collected thousands of photos of real tortoise shell and similar faux tortoise shell, things like that. And he put them into a machine learning model that we can then feed an image into, and it tells with a pretty high degree of accuracy, you know, 80, 90% whether it's real or not.
00;38;35;02 - 00;39;06;29
Speaker 3
And so then we turned that into an app. Yeah, like you said, SEE shell, you can find it on, you know, Google and Apple platform. So if you're
traveling to a place where you might come across these products and that's like I mentioned earlier, primarily in Latin America. So Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, Colombia are the primary places. But some, you know, in small pockets all around Central America and the Caribbean, Asia too, particularly Indonesia, China, Vietnam, it's actually still legal in Japan.
00;39;07;02 - 00;39;34;17
Speaker 3
There is a historic tortoise shell industry, kind of like the ivory industry in China and India, where there are artisans that turn it into honestly, really beautiful artwork. They're not allowed to export it. And the claim is that it's all coming from the stockpile of shells that were collected over decades. When the trade ended in the in the 90s, there is some evidence that there's still some illegal stuff coming in.
00;39;34;17 - 00;39;57;14
Speaker 3
But anyway, you can use this app, snap a picture with your phone, and it'll run it through our model and tell you if it's real or not. With a high degree of accuracy. And then we get to see it on the back end and can verify it. And if we identify places where this trade is happening in a major way, we can alert local authorities or local conservation groups around it.
00;39;57;14 - 00;40;01;01
Speaker 3
So it's a way for us to study the trade in a way for people to avoid it.
00;40;01;04 - 00;40;02;26
Speaker 1
How many people are using that now?
00;40;02;29 - 00;40;26;02
Speaker 3
We've had over 2000 downloads. We work with our local partners in a lot of the countries that I mentioned to do trainings of enforcement authority, so that could be environmental police or border patrol or Fish and wildlife agencies, things like that. So we do trainings on how to recognize these products and how to use those. So a lot of them are government enforcement officials.
00;40;26;02 - 00;40;32;12
Speaker 3
So I don't know exactly how many are travelers and how many are government. But you know, we've had yeah, several thousand downloads so far.
00;40;32;14 - 00;40;42;23
Speaker 1
I could really see how this could be used across all different types of smuggling too - with drugs or people or products, plants even.
00;40;42;25 - 00;41;13;08
Speaker 3
Yeah. That's our hope, is that this idea is taken and used for other animals. We think that it has potential applications with ivory Pangolin, any kind of product that has some visible variation. We think that this model can probably be as good at, or in some cases be even better than the human eye in detecting these things. So, you know, the international illegal wildlife trade is very sophisticated.
00;41;13;11 - 00;41;30;11
Speaker 3
It's all the same smuggling routes and smugglers as illegal drug trade, human trafficking, things like that. So any tools that help reduce the illegal wildlife trade affect all of these, you know, illegal smuggling rings.
00;41;30;13 - 00;41;44;16
Speaker 2
So yeah, you're slow going to read to where the whale community finally came up with one, see a blow go slow trying to get people to slow down their boats around where migratory areas and where whales are calving.
00;41;44;19 - 00;41;48;22
Speaker 1
It's simple. It's to the point they're very effective. What a great.
00;41;48;22 - 00;41;50;13
Speaker 2
A little slower that you guys.
00;41;50;16 - 00;42;04;16
Speaker 3
Yeah. No. Absolutely. Well I know that one of one of my good friends from the, wildlife conservation world who's, been a whale person is now down in your area. She, she recently started working at the Novo Center.
00;42;04;23 - 00;42;06;14
Speaker 1
Oh, yeah. Arianna.
00;42;06;16 - 00;42;19;27
Speaker 3
Katarina Audley (Development Director/Noyo Center for Marine Science, Fort Bragg, CA). Yeah. Yeah, I miss her. Going to be visiting her pretty soon. She was here in in Portland and is and is now there and just really loving your neck of the woods. So I'm excited to come down and visit.
00;42;20;00 - 00;42;44;27
Speaker 1
Oh yeah. That's just up the coast from us in Fort Bragg. And we had a good conversation with Sheila Semans who's the executive director there, and she was in the film that was premiering at the International Ocean Film Festival called sequoias of the sea. And it's about the loss of our bull kelp along our coast. And Noyo Center for Marine Science was prominent in that film.
00;42;45;00 - 00;43;03;28
Speaker 1
(Leigh Anne) And Scott and Tree, I mean, you guys have had a lot of interaction with that organization. (Tree) Oh, yeah, Noyo center. Absolutely. Yeah. It's a it's a great organization. And was so happy that Katarina is here now. You know, working with them. Is kelp, important to, sea turtles? (Leigh Anne) Oh good question.
00;43;04;01 - 00;43;31;00
Speaker 3
That is a good question. And you've got me a little bit stumped. Not that I'm aware of in particular. Um. Well. But the green turtles do eat primarily when they're adults, you know, things like algae and seagrasses or in some cases, they may consume kelp. But I'm not positive. I know that in Southern California, there is quite a few green turtles that hang out around San Diego.
00;43;31;00 - 00;43;39;03
Speaker 3
But I don't believe that kelp goes down quite that far. So there may be some interaction, but it's not something that I'm aware of. Yeah.
00;43;39;09 - 00;43;41;08
Speaker 1
(Tree Mercer) What do most sea turtles eat?
00;43;41;10 - 00;44;08;08
Speaker 3
It depends on the species. So opportunistically, most sea turtles will eat a jellyfish if they come across one. That's really the primary food of the leatherback. They love the jellyfish and that's why they do these huge migrations. So, for example, they're in California. They will come from all the way across the Pacific from Indonesia, Malaysia, all the way to Monterey Bay, where they come for, you know, the huge upwelling.
00;44;08;08 - 00;44;28;19
Speaker 3
And then they actually come up the coast past us here in Oregon, all the way up to Alaska looking for the really big
jellyfish. And I've heard estimates that they can eat more than half their body weight per day. And so we're talking about 8 or 900 pound turtles that, that can eat just gigantic amounts of jellyfish.
00;44;28;23 - 00;44;58;25
Speaker 3
The hawks bills be one of the reasons why they're considered, you know, really important keystone species is they eat sea sponges and sea sponges can compete with corals for space in a coral reef. So by having hawksbill in a coral reef, they can really help the reef thrive. I mentioned the greens primarily eat the vegetation, the, algae and seagrass, whereas the loggerheads, they focus primarily on the crustaceans.
00;44;58;25 - 00;45;05;27
Speaker 3
So they're eating urchins and lobsters and crabs and things like that.
00;45;06;00 - 00;45;12;26
Speaker 1
(Tree) Excellent. Thank you. (Brad) Yeah. (Leigh Anne) What got you down this path, Brad? And what is your background?
00;45;12;28 - 00;45;36;25
Speaker 3
Pretty random. I'll be completely honest. So I grew up in the Philadelphia suburbs, so I'm from Pennsylvania, and I did not have a real strong connection to nature growing up. But it was my sister who inspired me, my sister Kristen, who inspired me to become active in environmental issues. And in college, I became particularly interested in learning about environmental issues.
00;45;36;25 - 00;46;02;15
Speaker 3
And so I was learning about, you know, organic farming and wildlife conservation and climate change and things like that. And I ended up switching my degree in college from one focus on international business to one focused on environmental economics, which at the time was a brand new. I was in the first graduating class in that, from Penn State University in the in the late 90s.
00;46;02;17 - 00;46;23;24
Speaker 3
And when I graduated, I kind of said, you know, I want to work on these issues, but I don't really know how they work in practice. I've done a lot of theory and reading books and magazines and things, but I want to go and do it hands on. So I went online and I just can't even say I googled it because Google didn't even exist back then.
00;46;23;24 - 00;46;47;13
Speaker 3
But I searched for volunteer opportunities with environmental projects in Latin America and honest to God, every single thing that came up was working with sea turtles in Costa Rica. (Tree) Interesting. (Brad.) yeah, and I was like, sea turtles. Okay, I don't know much about that. Not really sure why, but I, you know, when I'd looked into it, you know, you didn't have to be a biologist.
00;46;47;13 - 00;47;11;24
Speaker 3
All you had to do was be able to walk on the beach and use a tape measure and a pencil, and I said, I can do that. And it was pretty affordable. Because I was a, you know, a recent college grad and didn't have a lot of money to spend. But, you know, I definitely came from a background where I had support from parents and you was able to save up some money delivering pizza and go down to Costa Rica.
00;47;11;24 - 00;47;30;14
Speaker 3
And I spent six months volunteering. So I worked for a couple of months on the Sea Turtle Project, and then I worked on an organic farm for a while. And, you know, I loved it. And at the time I was like, all right, that's great for my resume. I'm going to go back to the States and try to get a job working for an environmental organization and and I did that.
00;47;30;14 - 00;47;58;22
Speaker 3
I got a job in DC working on a climate change nonprofit is basically like an internship, but I spent every single day in DC daydreaming about Costa Rica and how much I loved it and how much I loved working with the turtles. And so that internship was done. I had saved some more money. I went back again. That's where I ended up meeting my ex-wife, who was a biologist on a project, and then we ended up getting hired to run a new project in Costa Rica, and it grew from there.
00;47;58;22 - 00;48;21;09
Speaker 3
So it wasn't something that I ever intended to do. So again, I'm going to bring up our late co-founder, Jay Nichols. He grew up around the Chesapeake Bay, and he would paint numbers on turtles that he found in the bay and see which ones returned. Kind of a crude form of a biological study, a population study. He was born to do this work, and he absolutely loved it from a small age.
00;48;21;11 - 00;48;45;18
Speaker 3
The first time I went down to Costa Rica, if you would ask me if sea turtles were reptiles amphibians, I'd have been like, reptiles, I think. Right? But I've really learned to love these animals, love the people that work with them, love the communities where they work. And so, you know, I'm really happy with the way that, you know, my accidental career has developed.
00;48;45;21 - 00;48;48;26
Speaker 1
What about your funding? Where does the funding come from?
00;48;49;02 - 00;49;11;07
Speaker 3
Our funding comes from a variety of sources. So one is these volunteer trips that we run so people pay to go on them. And that provides a really important source of income for us, for these communities, as I mentioned, for the conservation partners that we work with, we also have individual funders. We have a handful of foundations that support us.
00;49;11;09 - 00;49;47;16
Speaker 3
Probably the biggest chunk is business supporters. So particularly we like to work with businesses with strong records of sustainability. So we don't generally work with big, you know, multinational corporations. It's mostly smaller businesses we work with. For example, Nature's Path, organic foods, Endangered Species, chocolate, these great smaller brands that really put a lot of their resources into conservation schools, raise money for us, which we do fundraisers every fall with different schools around the country, which is really fun.
00;49;47;19 - 00;50;08;00
Speaker 3
Yeah. Up until January, we had some government funding, but we're also caught up in that funding freeze. We had a multi-year grant from the US Fish and Wildlife
Service for our tortoise shell program, which we were really excited about. It was our first major multi-year grant, and we were able to get most of the year one funding in before it was cut off.
00;50;08;00 - 00;50;29;10
Speaker 3
And we've pretty much written that off for now. So that's been a pretty major challenge for us. You know, our funding is pretty diversified. We don't have a huge staff. We have very low overhead. So we haven't had to lay people off, like a lot of other organizations have that have had this funding cut off, especially universities. Yeah, universities, nonprofit.
00;50;29;12 - 00;50;55;18
Speaker 3
It's, you know, different groups around the world. And we've actually been able to step in and help replace some of that funding for a couple of different organizations through some of our, you know, very generous funders. We have a couple of foundations that have stepped up to help fill that funding gap, which has been great. But yeah, we're hoping that at some point that the funding returns, even if it's in four years, it's really important source of funding for international conservation work.
00;50;55;26 - 00;51;01;11
Speaker 1
Let's talk about the student oriented tour ism that you were talking about earlier.
00;51;01;13 - 00;51;25;03
Speaker 3
Yes, there are some really great opportunities for students to learn about science and geography and culture and all these, you know, different amazing things by going and being there and visiting these sites. So we've worked with a handful of schools. We also work with a couple of different, aquariums to bring students to do hands on conservation work.
00;51;25;03 - 00;51;51;14
Speaker 3
And that's either in Mexico or Costa Rica, where the students go and meet the biologists, help collect the data, walk up and down the beaches, do the beach cleanups, and learn what it's like to be in this field. It's a really great learning experience for them, and it's a really great way to, you know, bring in volunteer help to these projects and to raise some funds for the conservation work.
00;51;51;19 - 00;52;18;25
Speaker 1
(Leigh Anne) Excellent. Yeah, I could see Tree, you being interested in something like that, if you'd. (Tree) Most definitely. Yeah, yeah. What an opportunity you're providing. I am extremely impressed. And I hope you can keep going, even with the cuts to your funding. And I can see that you're motivated to do so. So that's wonderful. We're really grateful. (Leigh Anne) You're really working with a lot of these other countries and these other communities that must take a lot of planning.
00;52;18;25 - 00;52;20;23
Speaker 1
Or how do you manage all of that?
00;52;20;29 - 00;52;46;18
Speaker 3
Yeah. It does. You know, we spend a lot of time, you know, interacting, having meetings, visiting where we can. I just spent a week visiting a bunch of different partners in Kenya and groups that are doing amazing work, you know, getting plastic out of sea turtle habitats and working on nesting beaches and in these communities. So, you know, really getting to know, you know, the needs of these local groups.
00;52;46;18 - 00;53;31;12
Speaker 3
We try really hard to not impose our US based belief system on some of these places, because we know that conservation is done differently and different people have different viewpoints about animals. You know, in a lot of these places, people have been eating sea turtles for generations. The place where I did most of my fieldwork, you know, back in the late 90s, early 2000, in the Caribbean of Costa Rica, pretty much that entire coast was inhabited by folks that were hired to build the Panama Canal and then moved northward after that, forming communities to catch sea turtles, to eat, to export, to sell.
00;53;31;19 - 00;53;59;00
Speaker 3
And so this entire economy for decades was built on eating these animals and people in many places. That's how they have survived for a long time. And so here in the US, we tend to look at sea turtles as these beautiful and sweet animals that should only be protected and not eaten. But we have to recognize that that's not how everybody feels everywhere.
00;53;59;00 - 00;54;28;03
Speaker 3
And so we try to give the local groups as much leeway to work in the realities where they're based as possible, and just provide the things that they are not able to access, like the funding, like the volunteer help. It definitely takes a mindset of collaboration and a lot of cases, you know, we as Americans will go to other places and believe that we know the best way to do things.
00;54;28;03 - 00;54;42;14
Speaker 3
What we try to do when we go to these places, just close their mouths and open our ears and listen and learn and not go in there with expectations and preconceived notions of how the work should be done there locally.
00;54;42;16 - 00;54;58;05
Speaker 2
And the only leatherbacks that I've seen have been from the air when doing aerial surveys. Even from 1000ft, they look enormous. Like you could touch the plane down on their backs on you're alongside of them, on a beach. I've only seen them from 1000ft straight up. So what's that like?
00;54;58;09 - 00;55;19;05
Speaker 3
Oh, it's an extraordinary experience. And, you know, we've had people cry the first time they see a leatherback. I mean, it really feels like an alien creature has crawled up out of the ocean. They're so different than the other turtles. They don't have that hard shell. You know, the leatherback. They have very different shaped shell. You can tell they're not built for land.
00;55;19;05 - 00;55;43;12
Speaker 3
It can take them 20 minutes to cross ten meters or 20 or 30ft of sand. They can be out there for hours digging their nests and camouflaging and stuff. Yeah, they are absolutely mind boggling animals. And for me, the most emotional part of it is watching them dig that nest, because once they start digging, they go into a trance.
00;55;43;12 - 00;56;07;19
Speaker 3
That's when we can
approach without disturbing them, and we stay behind them and watching them alternate their back flippers, digging out that hole and dropping those eggs and just knowing that that's something that's been happening for 100 million years, that you're getting to witness this ancient and beautiful process. Really, just to me, every single time I've seen hundreds of them now, every single time, it really gets me.
00;56;07;19 - 00;56;17;22
Speaker 3
So it's something that we recommend everybody, if you're interested, to take that opportunity and see these animals in person, because it can be a really life changing experience.
00;56;17;23 - 00;56;26;11
Speaker 1
(Leigh Anne) Well tell people how they can get in touch with you and what some of the upcoming trips are again, that you are doing. (Brad) absolutely.
00;56;26;12 - 00;56;49;15
Speaker 3
So yeah, you can find information on our website, as you mentioned, and thank you for spelling it out SEEturtles.org. We spell it a little bit differently SEEturtles.org. There you can find all of our trips. We have a couple of last spots on our upcoming trips to Galapagos, Cuba and Costa Rica. And then later in the year we have a couple of our Mexico trips.
00;56;49;17 - 00;57;10;29
Speaker 3
You can also donate to help save the baby turtles or to our tortoise shell program. You can adopt, sea turtle hatchlings and get a certificate. And we're also on all the socials at SEETurtles. My email address Brad@SEEturtles.org and yeah, get in touch if you have any questions, if you want to join us, if you want to support us, we would
00;57;10;29 - 00;57;12;07
Speaker 3
We would love to hear from folks.
00;57;12;09 - 00;57;14;11
Speaker 1
Is there something planned for Africa?
00;57;14;16 - 00;57;31;00
Speaker 3
Yeah, right now we're planning for probably February of 2026 to Kenya, which will be a week on the coast visiting some of these amazing and inspiring conservationists. And then a week long safari inland. And that is a pretty amazing experience. I just did my first safari and I was blown away.
00;57;31;01 - 00;57;47;14
Speaker 1
(Leigh Anne) Brad Nahill of SEE turtles organization, thank you so much for joining us. And Scott and Tree Mercer, thank you so much for all of your intelligent input and questions. (Tree) Just really grateful that you were able to join us and for the work that you do. Thank you. Brad.
00;57;47;20 - 00;57;51;19
Speaker 2
(Scott) Yeah, it's been fantastic. Brad. We are very happy to refer people up to you. (Brad) Yeah.
00;57;51;19 - 00;57;59;24
Speaker 3
And thank you so much for having us on. You know, it's been it's been a lot of fun.
00;57;59;27 - 00;58;04;15
Speaker 3
Closing music template with Eric Allaman’s composition Castle By the Sea and voiceover by Leigh Anne Lindsey, Host and Producer.
00;58;04;18 - 00;58;40;01
Speaker 1
Thanks for listening to the Resilient Earth podcast, where we talk about critical issues and positive actions for our planet. Resilient Earth is produced by Planet Centric Media, a 501 C3 nonprofit, and Sea Storm Studios, Inc.. I'm Leigh Anne Lindsey, producer and host, along with co-hosts and co-producers Scott and Tree Mercer of Mendonoma Whale and Seals study. Located on the South Mendocino and North Sonoma coast.
00;58;40;03 - 00;59;26;12
Speaker 1
The music for this podcast is by Eric Allaman, an international composer, pianist and writer living in The Sea Ranch. Discover more of his music, animations, ballet, stage and film work at EricAllaman.com. You can find Resilient Earth on Spotify, Apple and Amazon podcasts, iHeart radio, YouTube, SoundCloud and wherever you find your podcasts. Please support us by subscribing or donating to our cause.