São Tomé and Príncipe is somewhat lost and forgotten by the rest of the world. The few outsiders who do visit the country usually comment on the excellent coffee, the excellent chocolate (considered among the best in the world), and their shock at seeing sea turtle meat being openly sold in the market and sea turtles butchered on the islands’ picture-perfect beaches.

If you are reading this magazine, you probably already know that leatherback turtles face threats to their survival worldwide and that they have become a high conservation priority in many places. Indeed, if we are to ensure the long-term survival of this species, leatherback conservation efforts are needed in every place they are found.

Beyond enhancing the lives and careers of students, academic internships can also boost the success of a volunteer program while benefiting sea turtles and the nonprofits and local communities that work with them. Here are some tips for creating a successful academic internship program.

The conversation around valuing nature is expanding quickly to include the cognitive, emotional, psychological, and social benefits that we know are real drivers of the human-nature relationship. When neuropsychologists and conservation biologists team up, the results can be revolutionary.

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.

Costa Rica is a country of ocean, nature, and sea turtle superlatives. Five of the world’s seven species of sea turtles nest on its shores, a number exceeded only by the significantly larger countries of Australia and Mexico.

Kemp’s ridleys evaded the notice of scientists until the late 1800s. Once discovered, scientists took nearly 100 years to find out where and how they reproduce. In the past five years, an unexplained precipitous population decline has scientists scrambling to solve yet another riddle, one that will determine if the future of this critically endangered species is again in jeopardy.

Knowing where turtles are in a particular life stage is a critical first step to defining Important Turtle Areas (ITAs), and recent advances in technology are allowing scientists across the planet to begin to unravel many of the mysteries of where turtles go while at sea. One area where this technology was recently applied with great results is the Arabian region, a part of the world not well known for its sea turtles.