West Africa Conservation Efforts Have Brought About A Boom In Sea Turtles Nesting Sites

Combating climate change and extinction isn’t easy. People have converged and worked hard to save some of the endangered species in the planet. Yes, their efforts may have paid off, but there are also those that have seen mediocre improvements, if any at all.

Then, there are countries whose citizens have come together to join those troops in their fight. If only man learns to work in harmony, then big changes can actually happen. There are thousands of endangered species out there, one of which are the sea turtles.

Well, hope is on the horizon for these peaceful creatures.

The Guardian

There are beaches that have seen a great decline in the number of sea turtles in the area, but the West African nation of Cape Verde has seen a significantly impressive increase in the number of loggerhead sea turtle nests on its shores.

The number went up to a whopping 2,000 percent from the years 2015 to 2020. So many improvements have taken place that the archipelago in now known as the world’s second-most visited nesting spot for these large marine reptiles.

The country put people together and did the boots-on-the-ground kind of work. They knew that their economic state needed to change, and they have finally allowed the islanders of Cape Verde to see the turtles as an integral part of their marine ecosystem. Years before that, the changes were slow and insignificant, but this time, they needed to take big steps in seeing the difference.

In the last six years, nest counts on the islands of Sal, Maio, and Boa Vista have increased. Turtle nests have reason from 10,725 to nearly 200,000. More importantly, poaching has fallen with harsher punishments for those who don’t follow the new laws.


“With environmental education, watching over 180 kilometers of beaches and applying new legislation that criminalizes hunting and consumption of turtles, the catch rate has decreased significantly, from 8.25% in 2015 to 1.54% in 2020,” explained Gilberto Silva, Cape Verdean Minister of Agriculture and Environment.

During the turtles’ nesting season, hundreds of members from local NGOs go around to patrol the beach as they count the nests they see at night. Then, they stand guard to protect the turtles from potential poachers who mean to harm them for money. They also measure the eggs and secure a tracking chip on them. This has been done in order to observe nesting patterns and to study the movements the baby turtles make.


The most significant feature of the impressively triumphant conservation program is the punishment for those who poach. The Guardian wrote an article on this and reported that after new environmental laws were passed in 2018, these poachers are often sentenced to long hours of community service. During this time, the subjects caught are required to follow around the NGO workers and assist in the loggerhead conservation program. Rather than sending them to jail, the poachers are given the chance to see the sea turtles as a natural treasure rather than something they can earn a profit from regardless of what happens to the environment.

Cape Verde, much like countries such as Thailand and Florida, noticed that COVID-19-related restrictions led to rise in sea turtles from multiple species. While the pandemic did help, experts also believe that conservation work should be given more credit with the increase.

“Conservation efforts in Cape Verde began 20 years ago—that’s the time it takes for baby turtles to come back as adults,” said Albert Taxonera when he spoke to The Guardian. He is the founder and co-director of one of the turtle-protecting NGOs, Project Biodiversity. What the numbers say, at this point in time, is that the changes are good and that the people in the area need to work together more often in order to sustain this kind of success.

 

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