UCSC Researchers Helps Mexican Fishermen Save Endangered Sea Creature

Local News Printer Friendly Version Email Story to a Friend Subscribe Share this Story : delicious digg facebook newsvine October 18, 2007 Santa Cruz UCSC researchers helps Mexican fishermen save endangered sea creature By Alissa Poh Sentinel Correspondent Loggerhead turtles are facing extinction u" but not because of annihilation by huge factory trawlers plying the oceans. A new study published in the Wednesday edition of PLoS ONE, and led by UC Santa Cruz graduate student Hoyt Peckham, shows that loggerhead turtles are 10 to 100 times as likely to die through small-scale Mexican fisheries off the coast of Baja California as from all of the industrial fishing fleets in the North Pacific Ocean combined. "I really went there to study turtle foraging ecology," Peckham said of his research in Baja California. "I knew that bycatch was a problem" It was the work of Wallace J. Nichols of the Ocean Conservancy, and the study's co-author, who was placing satellite trackers on turtles in Baja and watching them swim to Japan, that originally fascinated Peckham. "How these animals migrate, why, what their cues are, what the energetics are behind it and so forth. [Instead] I got down there and spent months on shorelines with turtle carcasses," Peckham said. The counting and measuring of these carcasses was, Peckham said, "an awful process", and "one of the most difficult times I've ever had" That's the grim reality found in the study: Each year, off the coast of Baja California, more than 1,000 loggerhead turtles drown after getting entangled in the gill nets and long lines of local fishermen...