At the end of a mud-lined canal at the southern end of San Diego Bay, there is a wildlife hotspot that has long been kept secret. This canal is a conduit for 500 million gallons of hot chlorinated water discharged daily from a power plant operated by Duke Energy. It is also the hidden home of up to 60 Eastern Pacific green turtles (also known as black turtles because of their dark carapaces)—a species that once faced extinction, but now may be on a slow road to recovery.

To get to San Diego Bay, where they feed on eelgrass, the animals swim thousands of miles from nesting beaches in southern Mexico and in the Revillagigedo Islands south of Cabo San Lucas. Along the way, they must avoid poachers in the Pacific lagoons of Baja California (turtle meat is part of Mexico’s traditional cuisine), the longlines and nets of the shark and shrimp fleets, and the cargo containers and destroyers that move in and out of San Diego Bay. The canal where they rest between forays around San Diego Bay to search for eelgrass is at the edge of the South San Diego Bay National Wildlife Refuge.

The green turtle is one of five species of sea turtles that live or spend part of every year in the Californias, between the Upper Gulf of California Biosphere Reserve in the Sea of Cortez and California’s northern border. All are listed as either threatened or endangered in the United States and Mexico. All are long-distance swimmers.

Giant leatherback turtles travel from as far as Indonesia to feed on jellyfish in Monterey Bay. Loggerhead turtles swim from Japan to the North Pacific and travel south, along the entire length of California’s coast, to central Baja California where they feed on pelagic red crabs (also called tuna crabs). Olive Ridleys nest on the beaches of southern Baja California Sur and in southern Mexico, and most spend their lives in and around the tropical waters of the southern Sea of Cortez and mainland Mexico. At least one, however, came ashore last Thanksgiving in Marin County, to the astonishment of a turtle researcher who happened to be at the beach, only a few feet away. Hawksbill turtles are near extinction because their beautiful shells have been used for the making of “tortoiseshell” products. Remnant populations survive in the Sea of Cortez and embayments of the Mexican states of central mainland Mexico.

The lagoons and bays of Baja California and southern California once harbored thousands of sea turtles. In the mid-19th century, as whaling ships began to take them in huge numbers for export, one U.S. whaler reported filling a ship with 60 green turtles in Magdalena Bay alone. Later, gillnets, longlines, and poachers continued the destruction.

In 2000, fewer than 1,000 green turtles nested on the main nesting beaches of Michoacán in southern Mexico. In 2001, however, biologists saw a hopeful sign: almost 2,500 came ashore and laid their eggs, the highest number in 20 years.

The story of sea turtles of the Californias is also the story of a tenacious international team of Californian scientists and activists who are working to rescue them from oblivion. Working across the international border, they merge research and conservation in ways that could serve as a model for others in the struggle to preserve our marine heritage. Their work includes protective measures, such as the reporting of poachers, carrying out a Spanish-language binational “Don’t Eat Sea Turtle” campaign, and developing protected areas in key sea turtle feeding sites in California and Baja California.

Captain Eddie’s Turtles

Among the most fascinating sea turtles in the Californias are the green turtles that inhabit the warm waters of south San Diego Bay. Marine biologist Margie Stinson, assistant professor of marine biology at Southwestern College in Chula Vista, has been studying them since 1976, when Eddie McEwen, 84, the longtime skipper of the sportfishing and natural history tour vessel Pacific Queen, tipped her off to their presence in the canal of the power plant, then owned by Southern California Edison.

“Without Captain Eddie, I would never have known about sea turtles in San Diego Bay,” Stinson said. We were standing on a muddy bank, a few hundred yards from the Duke Power Plant in Chula Vista, watching for turtles in the discharge canal while 25 of Stinson’s students, deployed nearby, were timing the intervals of turtles coming up for breath. “Eddie was the first person to tell me about where the turtles were hiding out.”

Captain Eddie’s tip led Stinson to develop a personal interest in the sea turtles. With the assistance of power plant staff, she continued to observe them. This work led to a master’s thesis project—an encyclopedic two-volume tome about the turtles, completed in 1982. “The operators of the power plant and I were always worried that if more people knew about the turtles, there would be a greater chance that someone would harass them or even steal one,” she said. As far as they could tell, that did not happen, although a high school swim coach once “borrowed” a turtle to show to his team.

As Stinson continued her observations, she began to understand that some of the turtles were staying year-round. Instead of swimming south to the warmer waters of Baja California and the Sea of Cortez, they were burrowing into the mud around the canal during the winter. It appears that 60 to 80 turtles are now in residence, and some of them are large, mature adults.

Stinson later embarked on a career as a naturalist on the Pacific Queen and spent thousands of hours in the waters of Baja California, often observing sea turtles.

In the 1980s, Peter and Donna Dutton, who had previously researched sea turtles in French Guiana and St. Croix, also discovered those in San Diego Bay. Expanding on Stinson’s research, they determined that among the turtles that continued to migrate, most came from the Revillagigedo Islands and from the nesting beaches in Michoacán.

The Duttons also learned that green turtles, herbivores that favor eelgrass and algae, made ample use of the south San Diego Bay eelgrass beds—one of the few remaining eelgrass beds in the bay. After spending time in the discharge canal, they would swim out into the open bay, then make a circuit around the eelgrass patches south of the Coronado Bay Bridge.

Now the Duttons, Stinson and her students, and a squad of citizen monitors have embarked on a long-term project, calling themselves the San Diego Sea Turtle Team. Stinson continues to monitor the turtles immediately around the power plant, while the Duttons track turtle movements around the bay, using radio transmitters provided by a grant from the Port of San Diego. Dutton is also analyzing green turtle DNA to determine where they migrate from. He believes that the presence of a stable but small population of healthy green turtles in San Diego Bay could be important to recovery of the species, given the pressures on green turtle populations from poaching and bycatch, especially in Baja California.

The Sea Turtle Team is greatly assisted by Gerry Adler, an avid outdoorsman, and a squad of his friends who kayak on the bay two or three times a week. They keep a lookout for turtles and report sightings to Peter Dutton by e-mail. The animals generally concentrate in known feeding areas near the Sweetwater Marsh and around the eelgrass beds south of the Coronado Cays. Adler first heard of the turtle project from a local television news broadcast. Worried that the turtles’ presence, combined with the then newly established wildlife refuge, would lead to prohibitions on kayaking in the southern part of the bay, he contacted Dutton and volunteered to record his observations on sea turtles. His contribution not only has demonstrated the effectiveness of citizen monitors as reliable sources of data on sea turtles, but more important, it has made him and his fellow kayaker-observers into vocal protectors of these remarkable creatures. In December 2002, Adler successfully organized kayakers in San Diego to lobby the California Coastal Commission for a resolution supporting turtle conservation.

The San Diego Sea Turtle Team is a vital link in a growing conservation network spanning the U.S.–Mexico border to assist the recovery of sea turtles and create a culture of sea turtle conservation in the Californias.

Don’t Eat Sea Turtle Stew

If the turtles are to survive, cultural changes will be essential. In Mexico, sea turtle is valued, even revered, as a traditional dish, caguama. Consequently, a 1990 presidential decree forbidding the killing of turtles has been largely ineffective; indeed, it has perhaps only served to stimulate a thriving black market. A large turtle can bring up to $1,000, says Wallace J. Nichols, a biologist at WiLDCOAST, who began studying sea turtles in Baja California while a doctoral student in wildlife ecology at the University of Arizona. He estimates that some 35,000 sea turtles are netted each year in the waters of Baja California and the Sea of Cortez and sold in Mexico, Arizona, and California.

San Diego Bay, oddly enough, “is probably the only the place along the black turtle migratory route where they are not at risk from being caught by a poacher, butchered, and served at a restaurant for $40 a plate,” Nichols said.

On an overcast afternoon in July, I watched Javier Villavicencio, Isidro Arce, and Miguel Valenzuela expertly weigh five sea turtles they had caught in the mangrove- and dune-lined Estero Coyote, an uninhabited wetland south of Punta Abreojos, a fishing community of 1,000 about 700 miles south of the U.S. boarder. They treated each turtle with the speed and precision learned in a lifetime of handling fish and lobster. Each turtle was measured, weighed, tagged with a metal flipper tag, and returned to the shallow, eelgrass-lined waters of the estero. As Villavicencio was recording a turtle’s measurements, Arce—who at 6’3” towers over most of the fishermen in town—turned to me with tears in his eyes: “I never believed that we could be so successful at saving these tortugas,” he said. “I am so proud of my town.”

Arce and Villavicencio, who is also a passionate surfer, are founders and members of the Punta Abreojos CoastKeeper, a member of the International WaterKeeper Alliance. They are also members of a six-site, peninsula-wide sea turtle monitoring program, coordinated by Nichols and funded by the National Marine Fisheries Service and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

The surveys are carried out monthly, and data are tabulated, then faxed to Nichols. Of the six monitoring sites—Bahía de los Ángeles, Loreto, Scammon’s Lagoon, San Ignacio Lagoon, Bahía Magdalena, and Punta Abreojos—the highest records consistently come from Punta Abreojos. Nichols initiated the monitoring program last year to document the status of the green turtle population in their feeding grounds in Baja California. “For years, it was commonly believed that the only reason that black turtle populations had declined was egg poaching on the nesting beaches,” Nichols said, “But researchers at the University of Michoacán demonstrated that for the most part, the nesting beaches have been subject to stringent anti-poaching efforts for the past 20 years, and that nesting-beach protection efforts were working.” Although bright lights from nearby resorts now present a growing problem, Nichols determined that the decline in the nesting-beach population in Michoacán was due to the illegal trade in grown sea turtles.

Villavicencio and Arce enjoyed their greatest success so far when they assisted in the capture and arrest of Baja’s most notorious sea turtle poacher, Francisco “Gordo” Fischer. The infamous pirata later confessed from his Punta Abreojos jail cell that he had killed around 15,000 sea turtles over a 15-year period. Nichols believes that the dramatic improvement seen in the 2001 green turtle nesting-beach census is due to the arrest of Fischer who, he estimates, killed 1,500 adult females. But poaching continues. “There are probably about eight to ten poachers out there right now who are doing 90 percent of the damage to the black turtle population,” said Nichols.

If the turtles are to survive, poaching must be stopped. Just as essential is cultural change: human consumption of sea turtles will have to end. With that goal in mind, Villavicencio, Nichols, and Rubi Moreno, a former folksinger now working on sea turtle education for the Vizcaíno Biosphere Reserve in San Ignacio Lagoon, traveled to Mexico City in July 2002 and mounted a weeklong “Don’t Eat Sea Turtle” campaign on national television and radio. When the community of Punta Abreojos turned on their satellite dish– powered televisions on the morning of July 29 and watched one of their own on Primeras Notícias (the Good Morning America of Mexico) talking about the efforts of his neighbors to protect sea turtles, “It was one of the greatest days in the history of Punta Abreojos,” Arce declared. “It made us all want to work that much harder to protect our tortugas.”

During his recent visit with Fischer in prison, Villavicencio convinced the now repentant poacher to join the next “Don’t Eat Sea Turtle” campaign on its next stop in Mexico City in March 2003. Villavicencio plans to take Fischer onto the country’s major news programs and to expose the poaching networks that allow the black market trade in turtle meat to flourish in Baja California.

Local people working with conservationists and scientists are key to the future of the Californias’ sea turtles, those in Baja California as well as those in Monterey and San Diego Bays, and even along the wild coasts of Indonesia and the Western Pacific, where the leatherbacks that come to feed in Monterey Bay are most at risk. On December 10, 2002, the California Coastal Commission passed a resolution supporting efforts to protect these ancient mariners. It stated, in part, “Sea turtles are part of California’s natural heritage and marine biodiversity, are valued and appreciated by people of all cultural backgrounds, and as such possess inestimable intrinsic value to current and future generations.”

SERGE DEDINA is co-director of WiLDCOAST and the author of Saving the Gray Whale (University of Arizona Press, 2000). He is currently writing a book on marine piracy and wildlife poaching in Mexico.

(For the full text of this article, see the print edition of Coast & Ocean magazine.)

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