Sea turtles were already navigating the oceans when dinosaurs roamed the Earth. But these ancient creatures face an uncertain future. All seven sea turtle species are currently endangered or threatened, notes Christine Figgener, a German-born conservation biologist who has been working in Costa Rica for the past 16 years.
The number of nesting females on the beaches she studies is down more than 80 percent from when she first arrived there, Figgener said in an interview with Yale Environment 360. It’s part of a global decline driven by a perfect storm of threats including plastics in the ocean, chemical pollution, industrial fishing, unregulated coastal development, and climate change.
Figgener, 40, gained international attention when a video that she took of a sea turtle with a plastic straw lodged in its nostril went viral. The video helped launch a movement to eliminate plastic straws, which led to bans in Seattle and other cities around the world. But she says that’s only a start. “Our world, our oceans are much too complex to say that if we just stop eating fish or using plastic straws or what have you, sea turtles will be safe,” she said.
Her new book, My Life With Sea Turtles, will be published in May. In it, she argues that good science on turtle ecology together with the will to clean up our oceans can save the endangered reptiles. “Turtles have a lot going for them. They are incredibly resilient,” she told e360. “If we know enough about the ecology of the species, where they feed, where they mate, we can come up with successful strategies to save them.”
Christine Figgener with a baby sea turtle. Thierry Bois
Yale Environment 360: You’ve said that when you were in kindergarten, you told your classmates that you wanted to be an ocean explorer. What is it about the sea that fascinated you both then and now?
Christine Figgener: We have explored so much of the planet. There are no blank spaces left except for the ocean. I love mysteries, and that’s why I became a researcher, to explore them. In a world where we know so much, not knowing something creates a bit of magic that we all need. We all live for it.
e360: How did you come to study sea turtles in particular?
Figgener: My first interest was humpback whales. But as a master’s student I had the opportunity to go to Costa Rica to take part in a leatherback project. I’d never seen a sea turtle nesting before. It is this ancient creature larger than I am that goes through a life program that they have been following for millions of years. I quickly fell in love with sea turtles and felt guilt, in a way, too. I mean they have been around for such an incredibly long period of time. Here they are on the brink of extinction because of us humans. I just felt — that cannot happen, at least not in my lifetime.
“We have seen baby turtles getting stuck in water bottles. We saw a female who got lodged in a car tire and drowned.”
e360: What are some of the challenges for nesting sea turtles in Costa Rica?
Figgener: One of the big issues here is that we still have people eating sea turtle meat and eggs, and they are collecting hawksbill shells, which are carved to make jewelry and other trinkets. We also have a massive problem with erosion [of beaches where turtles nest] due to rising sea levels.
Nesting season is just now beginning here on the Caribbean coast. We are seeing one or two females nesting a night. When I first began my work here [in 2007] we were seeing 800 leatherback females nesting in a season. Now we are down to 50 to 150 on our beach. That downward trend is happening all over the world.
e360: You excavate sea turtle eggs and rebury them. Why?
Figgener: We do this because poachers would see the tracks in the sand of the nesting females and find the eggs if we left them where they were. Or in some cases the ocean would wash them away if they were buried too low down on the beach. So what we do is we put a little bag under the female while she is laying the eggs and we take the eggs to a more secure place to rebury them. We are careful to leave no track, so the poachers won’t know where they are.
e360: Your work became widely known when you released a video of an olive ridley sea turtle with a plastic straw stuck in his nostril. How did you come across him?
Figgener: We were conducting a study of mating olive ridley turtles on the Pacific Coast. We measured the turtles, took genetic samples, and then put them back in the water. This one male had something strange in his nose. We thought at first it might be a barnacle or a tube worm. But when we started pulling it out and snipped off a little piece, it became clear that it was plastic straw.
When sea turtles feed, they swallow a lot of seawater and expel it through their nostrils. We think that the straw got stuck in the nostril that way.
e360: Plastic straws are hardly the only hazard. Can you tell us about some other things you’ve seen?
Figgener: We have seen baby turtles getting stuck in water bottles. We saw a female who got lodged in a car tire and drowned. We’ve seen all kinds of entanglements in plastic bags and sacks. We saw a sea turtle that had dragged an entire fishing rod onto the beach.
Once, I watched this female leatherback turtle on our beach trying to lay her eggs. She was pressing and pressing and nothing came. Eventually I felt with my hands in her cloaca, and there was something funny in there. I tugged on it, and it came out, a plastic trash bag. She had ingested it, and she was lucky enough that it went through the entire intestinal tract. After I removed the bag, she was finally able to lay her eggs.
“We’re losing, conservatively, hundreds of thousands of sea turtles as incidental bycatch in fishing nets every year.”
e360: Turtles sometimes mistake plastic bags for jellyfish, which is one of their foods. Isn’t that right?
Figgener: Plastic bags do look a lot like jellyfish. In addition to that, the longer plastic floats through the ocean, the more of a biofilm forms on its surface, and there is increasing scientific data that it smells like food to the turtles.
e360: Aren’t fishing nets also a threat?
Figgener: Absolutely, industrial fishing is a major threat. We’re losing, conservatively, hundreds of thousands of sea turtles as incidental bycatch in fishing nets every year. We also have the problem of so-called ghost nets, nets that were lost or dumped and abandoned. Once a turtle gets entangled in a ghost net, they drag this big weight behind them. In some cases, they are not able to move at all. It also leads to many nasty cuts, amputations, and limb loss in sea turtles. Even a single fishing line wrapped around a flipper can cut off blood flow.
e360: Can you talk about how pollution has impacted sea turtle populations.
Figgener: Petroleum gets into the ocean through spills and other ways. Fertilizers and pesticides wash into rivers and end up in the oceans. In green turtles there is a type of cancer called fibropapillomatosis, which creates cauliflower-shaped tumors on soft tissue, like the eyes and the skin, and is basically triggered by fertilizer runoff. This runoff also creates dead zones in the ocean and toxic red tides where the turtles will feed on the algae blooms and eventually die.
An olive ridley sea turtle hatchling heads for the sea in Lhoknga Beach, Indonesia. CHAIDEER MAHYUDDIN / AFP via Getty Images
e360: There are seven major species of sea turtle. All of them are currently endangered or threatened. Why have their numbers been declining so fast? What cause is most responsible for this?
Figgener: I get asked this question a lot, but I think it is misleading because it gives people the idea that if they just fix this one issue, the problem will be solved. Our world, our oceans are much too complex to say that if we just stop eating fish or using plastic straws or what have you, sea turtles will be safe.
e360: We’ve been talking about the problems. But you also write about an amazing success story. The Kemp ridley sea turtle was brought back from the brink of extinction. How did that happen?
Figgener: A lot of things came together in the favor of the Kemp ridleys. Back in the late 70s and 80s there were only a few hundred nesting females left in the Gulf of Mexico. These turtles often ended up in the nets of shrimp trawlers. In response, the U.S. mandated a turtle excluding device attached to the nets which reduced bycatch by about 90 percent.
“Sea turtles have a lot going for them. They are incredibly resilient. They’ve been around for millions of years.”
Another thing is there was a huge exploitation of eggs happening in Mexico. There were also slaughterhouses for Kemp ridleys and olive ridleys there. Those slaughterhouses were closed, and egg collection was prohibited by the Mexican government.
Some eggs were transported from Mexico to Texas where [a nesting colony was re-established at Padre Island National Seashore.] And there was a “head start program” in the U.S. in which eggs were incubated in a controlled environment and then grown until they were the size of a plate and no longer so vulnerable to predation as tiny baby sea turtles are when they are born. These turtles were then released into the Gulf.
e360: Does the success of these initiatives give you hope? Can it be reproduced elsewhere?
Figgener: Data-driven approaches are definitely the way to go. Turtles have a lot going for them. They are incredibly resilient. They’ve been around for millions of years. If we know enough about the ecology of the species, where they feed, where they mate and so on, it could happen. We can come up with successful strategies to save them. So that’s why I’m convinced that we need good scientific data, together with the will to take effective measures for their protection.
A woman from the town of Barra de Santiago in El Salvador shelters the eggs of an olive ridley sea turtle. Alex Pena / Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
e360: You founded the Costa Rican Alliance for Sea Turtle Conservation and Science (COASTS). I know you’ve been critical of some big conservation groups that come to developing countries almost with a colonial attitude. You make a point of training Costa Ricans to do the science.
Figgener: I’m currently working together with Ariana Oporta. I met her when she was around 14 years old. She always wanted to be a biologist. I don’t think people understand the kind of obstacles people like her face. The public schools in rural Costa Rica are not very good. But she managed to get herself two scholarships to leading universities where she was trained as a marine biologist. When I set out to found COASTS, she was the person I wanted to do it with.
As a German I can be a little strong at times. Ariana is the face of the organization. The locals sometimes don’t trust the scientists who come in from the outside. Ariana helps to bridge those gaps.
e360: How have attitudes of local people changed?
Figgener: The kids who we did environmental education with, who we taught about sea turtles, they are way more open-minded. There is a generational change. We always have students from outside Costa Rica, and tourists. I think that passion that makes people travel all that way to see a nesting sea turtle definitely changes something in the mindset of the people who live here. It also shows them that you can earn more money with a live turtle than by eating the meat or selling the eggs.
This interview was edited for length and clarity.
