A friend I recently joined for supper reminded me of the time she took me to a seafood restaurant to show me that it still served sea turtle soup even though Mexico banned trade in sea turtles and their byproducts in 1990. That also showed me that laws aren’t enough to preserve biodiversity. Awareness is […]
Turtles
De Machetes y Marsopas (About Machetes and Porpoises)
With unheard of ferocity, furtive hunters from the town of Santa Maria Tonameca, massacred 80 marine turtles on the beach of Escobilla, Oaxaca, one of the principal nesting sites for the Olive Ridley in Mexico, and in the world. Massive killings on this scale in the middle of the nesting season are bad news for […]
Semarnat, Underneath the Carapace
Among the dead on the beaches of Guerrero between last September and January of this year were two young teaching assistants from the Veterinary and Zoological Schools of UNAM (Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico) and more than 500 Laud and Golfina turtles. The former were probably murdered while trying to protect the latter. Marco Antonio […]
Let Us Save the Leatherback Turtle
The Leatherback Turtle, one of the most ancient species of marine turtle to roam the oceans of the world, and also the largest in existence, is on the point of disappearing. The extraordinary and majestic Leatherback Turtle (Dermochelys Coriacea), with its smooth skin and seven edges along the carapace, has for millennia crossed, among others, […]
Report on Sea Turtle Conference
(This article was originally published in the Journal of Environment and Development, Vol. 11, No. 2, 2002). How do you gauge the successfulness of an environmental conference? If it is based on numbers of attendees, it would be hard to dispute the success of the 4th Annual Meeting of the Sea Turtle Conservation Network of […]