The coastline of Los Cabos is already highly developed, and coastal hotels and resorts have grown an additional 15 percent since 2009. While poaching and bycatch are significant threats to sea turtles in the region, coastal development and its impact on nesting beaches pose the greatest threats.

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 realm of sea turtle conservation, private enterprise is rarely considered a lead player. At best, it fills a supporting role through corporate financing of conservation projects, but more often it plays the villain. Mexico needs tangible efforts that seek common ground between tourism and conservation sectors.

When you look at a typical global map of nesting sites for any sea turtle species—such as the maps in previous SWOT Reports—what you see is a lot of dots. Before a dot can be plotted, researchers first toil long days and nights on the beach, recording nests or nesting females and then contribute their hard-won data to SWOT’s database.

Money alone does not make conservation happen, but it is a necessary ingredient, and acquiring it can be one of our greatest challenges as conservationists.

Advances in computing power, simulation modeling software, remotely sensed data for ocean currents, sea surface temperatures, and other conditions, and new data on sea turtle biology are giving rise to a new generation of problem-solving tools for sea turtle research and conservation.

Humans are social animals. Our attitudes and behaviors are guided by others in our societies through the competition of selfish interests, taboos, tacit rules, formal law, policing, and the degree to which we submit to governance. What follows is an examination of how these controls on human behavior can change through persuasive efforts.

Despite the collateral damage they do, Peruvian small-scale fisheries form the backbone of Peru’s fishing sector and are the main source of income for more than 200,000 coastal families. Enter ProDelphinus, a Peruvian not-for-profit organization that is using real-time, two-way radio communication with fishermen at sea to help reduce the incidental capture of marine fauna and to promote long-term fishery sustainability.

Because nesting female turtles—and their hatchlings—are so readily available to humans for study, they have been the focus of monitoring and conservation projects worldwide for decades. But with virtually no information about males, our understanding of how sea turtle populations really work is severely limited. Here’s where the sea turtle detectives come in.

Sea turtles do not recognize political boundaries, nor do they have regard for Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZs), cooperative agreements, international conventions, or memoranda of understanding between countries. In the Southwest Indian Ocean, these elements come into play in ways that drastically affect the lives of important green and loggerhead sea turtle populations.