Jessy was taught the art of turtle catching by village elders in Ulithi, Yap, Micronesia, where he grew up hunting sea turtles as a means to provide food for his community. Jessy still hunts turtles—for research.

Turtle excluder devices (TEDs) have been shown to reduce sea turtle bycatch. Yet fishers often see things differently, and as with the use of any tool, the use of TEDs must be mastered through experience. Today, TEDs are widely accepted as part of the bycatch solution and are mainstreamed into daily fishing activities throughout the United States.

Until recently, the exploitation of sea turtles was still legal under Bahamian law. In September 2009, an important victory for the protection of sea turtles occurred when the government of The Bahamas declared a complete ban on the directed take of sea turtles.

Sea turtles are survivors. They have weathered radical climate changes in the past 100 million years. However, they have never faced anthropogenic changes of the scope and speed proposed for the coming decades.

To truly understand how these animals live, we need to get wet. After all, they are sea turtles, not beach turtles. Modern technology allows scientists to follow turtles wherever they go, to see what they see, and thus to better understand and protect them in their watery world.

According to that lovable loggerhead Crush—the surfer-dude sea turtle from the movie Finding Nemo—the East Australia Current (EAC) is a sea turtle highway, where turtles hitch a free ride from one place to another, and this observation isn’t too far from the truth.

This beach was first noticed in 1974, when Robert Bustard visited the mangrove forests of Bhitarkanika—in Orissa on the east coast of India—in search of saltwater crocodiles. In passing, he heard of a beach where thousands of turtles arrived each winter. The following year, he returned with a group of young and enthusiastic biologists, and soon after announced to the world that they had discovered the world’s largest rookery for the species.

The manufacturing of this NGO’s souvenirs generates employment for hundreds of people and is a considerable stimulus to the local economy.

During the past year, SWOT has developed a strategy to achieve the long-term goal of making SWOT a global monitoring system for sea turtle populations and species. SWOT is creating a one-of-a-kind statistical modeling program that will be a tool for researchers and data providers to analyze their data and to estimate actual nesting numbers in the absence of complete monitoring coverage.

We crave oil and gas, and we are running out of those fuels. In this article, experts explore the myriad effects of oil extraction on sea turtles.