The Mediterranean Sea is a bountiful yet dangerous place for sea turtles. Characterized by beautiful natural and cultural heritage sites and by rich biodiversity, the Mediterranean is also a troubled and overexploited sea, where sea turtles have a hard time coping with high fishing pressure, gas and oil development, major cross-continental maritime traffic, beachfront and other habitat impacts, and widespread marine pollution.

TEDs are a simple but elegant solution for minimizing sea turtle bycatch in trawl fisheries. As such, they are now mandated by many governments around the world and their use is enforced. However, Europe, which is the largest market for fisheries products in the world, has no such regulation and provides an alternative market for countries that do not use TEDs.

Geopolitics of the past have left France with many territories that are spread across the globe, and the coincidental overlap of so many sea turtle regional management units is a fortunate consequence that allows France to play a disproportionately important role in sea turtle conservation. In this article, members of the French Marine Turtle Group offer an overview of the distribution and movement of turtles in French waters, as well as the threats facing turtles in French territories around the world. 

Coming face to face with a living fossil underwater is a unique experience, and prolonged in-water sea turtle observation can teach us new and unexpected things about turtles that will help us to conserve them and their ocean habitats.

The two largest aggregations of loggerhead sea turtles in the Mediterranean Sea, representing 27 percent of all loggerhead nesting in that basin, are in Greece: Laganas Bay on Zakynthos Island and Kyparissia Bay in western Peloponnese, with Laganas Bay historically considered the largest.

Over the past six years, coastal tourism and real estate development in the Mediterranean have gained new momentum as drivers for economic recovery among countries hit by the economic crisis. This resurgence in coastal development is affecting loggerhead nesting sites.

In the absence of enforcement of local and national urban planning in Zakynthos Bay, small-scale illegal buildings, walls, and roads have increasingly encroached on Zakynthos’ once-pristine nesting beach of Daphni.