December 16, 2020 — The following was released by NOAA Fisheries:
Enormous Pacific leatherback turtles are so ancient they lived with the dinosaurs. Now a new survey shows that leatherbacks that forage off the U.S. West Coast are trending towards extinction in as little as a few decades.
These endangered turtles are the largest living turtles, weighing up to 1,500 pounds. They are fully protected in U.S. waters, likely the safest waters they traverse in their cross-Pacific migrations. After feeding on jellyfish and growing in U.S. waters, adult turtles migrate back west across the Pacific Ocean to beaches in Indonesia and Solomon Islands. That’s where they reproduce and females lay their eggs.
Biologists fear illegal, unregulated, or insufficiently regulated fishing on the high seas may catch and kill many leatherbacks on their year-long treks across the ocean. They also suffer from poaching and loss of habitat in their nesting areas.
“Probably the safest place for Pacific leatherbacks is in the West Coast Exclusive Economic Zone,” said research biologist Scott Benson of NOAA Fisheries’ Southwest Fisheries Science Center. The Exclusive Economic Zone is the area where U.S. laws apply to 200 miles offshore. “It’s what happens in all of the other waters they are swimming through that really worries us.”
Benson is lead author of the new study of western Pacific leatherbacks, one of two populations of leatherback turtles in the Pacific, published last month in Global Ecology and Conservation.