Grupo Tortuguero: Pacific Sea Turtle Tracking

A project of Grupo Tortuguero Tracking Project in conjunction with the partners and sponsors detailed below.

Subscribe to receive daily project updates

Click on an animal's name for maps and more information.

Introduction

We are working to understand the life history of endangered Pacific sea turtles, particularly along the Pacific coast of Mexico. By learning about sea turtle ecology and migration we partner with local fishermen and agencies to reduce and eliminate sea turtle bycatch. Our goal is to make our oceans safe for sea turtles.

Loggerhead turtles, known locally as caguamas, connect the ecosystems and cultures of the Pacific Rim through their migrations; as juveniles they travel from Japan to Mexico via the Hawaiian archipelago, and at maturity they return to their Japanese nesting beaches to reproduce. These Pacific ambassadors gather for decades at the coast of Baja California Sur to feed and mature. Off Puerto Lopez Mateos, they forage especially close to shore where artisanal gillnet and longline fishing is intense. This unfortunate overlap of fishing and foraging results in severe loggerhead bycatch, contributing more than any other known source to their critically endangered status and distinguishing them as among the most endangered of sea creatures. ProCaguama, a community-based campaign of the grassroots conservation network Grupo Tortuguero, is empowering fishers and other coste?os to protect endangered sea turtles and the threatened ecosystems they inhabit through partnerships to eliminate bycatch.

You'll notice three major groups of tracks: 1) pelagic movements of olive ridley and loggerhead turtles, 2) coastal homing migrations of green turtles (from Baja California to Michoacan), and 3) coastal post-nesting movements of green turtles away from nesting beaches in Michoacan Mexico.

Project Partners

The Grupo Tortuguero?s Pacific Sea Turtle Tracking Project is a collaborative effort between artisanal fishers and other coste?os of the Baja California peninsula and J. Nichols (ProPeninsula and CA Academy of Sciences), Hoyt Peckham (ProPeninsula and UC Santa Cruz), Rodrigo Rangel (Grupo Tortuguero), and Peter Dutton (NOAA SWFSC). George Balazs and Jeff Polovina of NOAA Fisheries contribute to the project in an advisory role. We also work with a number of academic and NGO partners such as CIBNOR, COBI, Duke University, GEA, SFS, University of Michoacan, TOPP and UABCS.

A special thanks to SEMARNAT (Mexican government environmental agency) and NMFS and USFWS (US government environmental agencies).

Project Sponsors

Grupo Tortuguero thanks all of our partners and sponsors!

Tags and Argos time for this project (2005) are provided by NOAA SWFSC (http://swfsc.nmfs.noaa.gov/PRD/PROGRAMS/turtles/ ). Additional tags were graciously provided by Dan Costa and Barb Block through TOPP in 2005 and 2006. ProCaguama fieldwork is made possible with support from the generosity of our local partners, the David and Lucille Packard Foundation, the National Marine Fisheries Service, the PADI Foundation, Project AWARE, the Western Pacific Fisheries Research Council, and private donors.

This research is permitted by SEMARNAT (Secretaria de Medio Ambiente y Recursos Naturales) permit # 10358 and by the UC Santa Cruz Chancellor?s Animal Research Committee.