Conserving Sea Turtles by N.

Mrosovsky is a book that highlights and critiques

many kinds of sea turtle conservation efforts. Mrosovsky does a thorough job of
covering a wide range of techniques popular at the time. He prefaces the book by
saying that he does not need to explain why sea turtles need to be conserved,
which I believe is not a good strategy. I dont disagree that sea turtles need to be
conserved, but I dont believe I have learned why exactly we care so much about
conserving them. If he were to start with his reasoning, it would give the rest of the
book more value. For example, he talks at the beginning about how turtles are
big, as in popular, but does not explain why. Except for their importance to a few
aboriginal tribes, I have still yet to learn why conserving sea turtles is so important
to humans.
The author coined the term, tagging reflex, in order to criticize the copious
amounts of tagging for no apparent reason. He calls it a reflex because there seems
to be tagging just for the sake of tagging, for collecting data. I dont think this
criticism is valid because tagging is very important. I think that learning as much
information as possible about sea turtles is the best way to try to conserve them.
Tagging can tell us vital tidbits of information, such as growth and maturity rates,
geographic range, frequency of egg-laying, etc. This is why it was so important to
Carloss group to continue tagging and keeping track of information. Knowing these
pieces of information could be crucial to any management plan.
In his next chapter, Mrosovksy brings up very valid points about the negative
aspects of head-starting. The turtles are being put into an unnatural environment,
which is something that I believe should always be a last resort. They could get
used to being in captivity and not know how to survive in the wild. This could also
alter their imprinting abilities on their natal beaches. Another critique of something

that involved moving turtles around was about Operation Green Turtle. The
strategies used were not standardized or reported, making it hard to test the
usefulness of the project. There has been no evidence that translocation was
successful.
In his chapter on Styrofoam boxes, Mrosovsky has positive things to say
about the effectiveness of the boxes on hatching rates, but warns that there are
greater implications in terms of sex ratios. Eggs incubated in Styrofoam boxes are at
lower than natural temperatures. This results in a male bias when the eggs are
hatched. For Mrosovsky, this poses a problem, but I see it as an opportunity. We
learned about operational sex ratios in this course, and the importance of having
enough males to sustain the population. I think that if we have data on populations
with relatively low numbers of males that we could use the Styrofoam box method
to boost the number of males in that population to a better operational sex ratio.
Similarly, the same could be done in order favor the number of females in case
there was a shortage of them. This time it would be by moving a nest to a prime
location on the beach, like we did, and protecting it, making sure that the females
born from that clutch survive.
In his next few chapters, Mrosovksy seems to be a proponent of the Cayman
Island Turtle Farm. He argues that by keeping turtles raised in captivity, there can
always be a supply on hand to release into the environment, and the population will
be sustained for human consumption. I believe this is not a good idea to keep up
the population of sea turtles for a number of reasons. There is much potential harm
to the environment and to turtles that come from this system that Mrosovsky didnt
mention. All of the same evils of commercial, terrestrial agriculture could come of
turtle mariculture. This involves having high concentrations of turtle waste that will

pollute the environment and having widespread disease and infection within the
turtle population (Ehrenfeld).
There is also the moral argument against turtle farming. Mrosovsky claims
that there is some sort of intrinsic reason why sea turtles should be protected; why
does this not afford them the protection from hunting or being farmed as well? Ians
talk about aboriginal hunting brought up a lot of interesting moral dilemmas. Why
are we killing the animals that we want to save? It seems counter-intuitive, even if it
might have benefits in terms of actual numbers of turtles. We also have to think
about the fact that some humans may depend on turtles as their main source of
protein consumption, and weigh this against whatever intrinsic value sea turtles
might have.
I think that Mrosovksy is really critical about many forms of turtle
conservation where he may even be too critical, but not critical enough to the
subject of turtle farming. He even believes that sea turtles should be managed as a
natural resource, as he goes on to discuss in Chapter 14. I think that we learned
about some of the best conservation strategies, that dont include turtle farming. I
believe that the best strategies target reproductive-aged, nesting turtles, and beach
protections. Closing the beach or putting fencing around nests, putting barriers up
in order to protect turtles, and building up beaches with sand (if similar, not-darker
sand can be used) are the best bet to protecting these turtles. In general, I believe
that the best strategies are to keep things as natural as possible: to amend the
natural environment to give the turtles the best chance at survival.
Over all, Mrosovsky brings up some very valid points in his book about
conservation methods for sea turtles. I think the main take away is to always be

critical of proposed methods. Such methods should be tested rigorously in order to

ensure that they actually work. Detailed information of all stages of the process
should be taken down. This is something that was exemplified with all the teams we
worked with, as there was a very uniform way of doing things. And by far, I think
that the most important thing when it comes to conservation is to make sure that
proposed methods are cost-effective, so that they can be backed up by
governments and other organizations.