The rangers walking the beach tonight are part of a new monitoring effort, led by The Nature Conservancy, to gather information about the Western Pacific leatherbacks nesting in the Solomon Islands.

There is a persistent perception that men should be the decision-makers and leaders in most contexts, both within conservation/natural resource management organizations and in the communities where they work.

Williams-Guillen and Pheasey found that while poachers tended to sell eggs locally door to door, the InvestEGGator was also able to track long-range transport—one trip was 137 kilometers long, from the beach to central Costa Rica.

© Jim Harding Especially galling to wood-turtle managers is that after they’ve painstakingly restored habitat and rebuilt populations, these strongholds become prime targets for poachers.

Cisco Talos researcher Craig Williams says the Sea Turtle campaign is disturbing not only because it represents a series of brazen cyberspying operations, but also because it calls into question that basic trust model of the internet.

“Getting that smell out of their coats is going to be a project.” Rucker gives a few quick commands and his field assistants – four female Boykin spaniels – finish their impromptu break, and get back to the job at hand: namely, tracking and retrieving every ornate box turtle they can find in these restored and remnant native prairies.

“But it’s illegal to sell turtles, take their eggs, or to kill a female that is nesting on the beach.” Those restrictions are put in place to protect sea turtles from overharvesting, as most species have experienced catastrophic population declines in the last few decades.

In some areas with high levels of plastic pollution, like the Mediterranean and the southern Atlantic Ocean, turtles are unable to avoid the debris, while in other areas it is less of a problem.“We know individual turtles are dying, but we don’t know yet whether enough turtles are dying to cause population decline, and that’s where we’re heading to now,” Dr. Hamann said.Jennifer Lynch, a research biologist with the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Hawaii, took issue with the way the study measured vulnerability to plastic.In her own research, she has seen animals that aren’t harmed after swallowing 300 pieces of plastic, so she doesn’t believe that 14 pieces pose such a high risk of death.