Working to Slow the Frightful Pace of Extinction
Marine Lab's Karen and Scott Eckert make it their personal mission to take sea turtle conservation to the local level.
By Tim Lucas
The six species of sea turtles that call the turquoise waters of the Caribbean Sea home have survived disasters, plagues and predators for more than 100 million years.
Endowed with natural armor, long lifespans, and hydrodynamic bodies capable of swimming long stretches, they’ve been able to outdistance, out-dive or simply outlast the dangers nature’s dished out. They even survived the extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.
But now, there’s widespread concern that the combined pressures of poaching, fisheries by-catch, habitat destruction and other modern human activities may do what asteroids and hurricanes couldn’t.
Populations of loggerhead, leatherback, hawksbill, Kemp’s ridley, olive ridley and green sea turtles have declined sharply since World War II. All six species are now classified as endangered by the IUCN World Conservation Union. Three of them—the hawksbill, Kemp’s ridley and leatherback—are critically endangered. According to IUCN criteria, species are classified as endangered if they have declined by at least 50 percent over the last three generations. Critically endangered species must have declined by at least 80 percent.
“It would be a tragedy for these species to have come safely through the eons only to succumb on our watch to dangers that are almost entirely manageable,” says Karen L. Eckert, assistant research scientist at the Nicholas School and an internationally recognized expert on marine turtle conservation policy.
Since 1989, Eckert has served as executive director of the Wider Caribbean Sea Turtle Conservation Network (WIDECAST), the world’s oldest, largest and most active regional sea turtle research and conservation network, now based at the Duke University Marine Laboratory in Beaufort, N.C.
“On some beaches where thousands of sea turtles once crawled ashore to nest, we now count them in the hundreds, the dozens, or less,” she says. “We have not only watched their numbers decline, but also their geographic range. Hundreds of beaches that once supported sea turtle nesting no longer do.”
The situation is grave, Eckert stresses, but it’s far from hopeless.
After years of decline, some of the Caribbean’s turtle colonies are beginning to rebound. Two of the most successful recoveries are taking place on the islands of Antigua and Trinidad, where government agencies, beachfront property owners, fishermen and other local stakeholders have worked together with WIDECAST to develop policies and practices that protect the turtles while respecting the rights and unique cultures of the islands’ human residents.
“Like politics, all conservation is local,” Eckert says. “We can prevent the extinction of these six species if we stop pointing the finger of blame at local residents engaged in outdated hunting or land-use practices, and extend them a hand instead, so they become part of a more sustainable landscape.”
“You can’t manage turtles in isolation from their environment,” agrees Eckert’s husband, Scott A. Eckert, also an assistant research scientist at the Nicholas School. “Sea turtle conservation is equally about preserving coastal habitats and empowering the people who live there.”
photo captions: Karen Eckert instructs students about sea turtles at Topsail beach sea turtle hospital,Topsail Beach, N.C.; Scott Eckert examines a leatherback sea turtle nesting at Matura Beach,Trinidad,WI