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.

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.

Local turtle champion Kutlay Keço has been watching green and loggerhead turtles nest on Alagadi Beach in northern Cyprus since the 1970s. Alarmed at the ever-increasing levels of nest predation by stray dogs, he invited two university students, Annette Broderick and Brendan Godley, to collaborate in surveying the population. In 1992, they established the Marine Turtle Conservation Project, documenting a 90 percent nest predation rate, and they set out to turn these unsustainable losses around.

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.

When Israeli and Hezbollah fighters went to war on July 12, 2006, the loggerhead nesting season in south Lebanon at Mansouri and Koliala beaches was in full swing. We had no plans to leave the beach, where we have conducted a monitoring program since 2000 with the help of the Mediterranean Association to Save the Sea Turtles.

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.