It's been our experience that those who would spend two decades or more working closely with fishermen to understand and protect sea turtles typically have the best interests of both people and nature in mind, although sometimes they are called "turtle-huggers" or scapegoated over another competing agenda.

Back in the early 1990’s when we learned about the mass mortality of loggerhead sea turtles off the Pacific coast of Baja from geographers Serge Dedina and Emily Young, we responded immediately.

Here’s how Dr. Dedina describes what they found:



"We first started noticing the mortality of loggerheads on Magdalena Island on the trip out to Cabo San Lazaro in the Spring of 1994 when we noticed a few animals stranded on the beach. But as summer progressed we saw more and more. What was fascinating was to see the correlation between stranded loggerheads and the abundant coyote population who fed on the animals as they washed up. There were literally dozens of coyotes sitting in the dunes apparently satiated after a night of feeding.

By July 1994, on one return trip from San Lazaro, we counted more than 224 dead loggerheads, so many, that the fishermen we were with were clearly embarrassed. They all knew that the turtles were being caught in gill-nets. In fact we had been out shark fishing with fishermen in the spring and had seen the problem ourselves."