Costa Rican marine biologist Ariana Oporta-McCarthy grew up close to where a critically-endangered turtle nests: now she’s helping to save it.
Over the last 200 years, the Hawksbill turtle (Eretmochelys imbricata) has become critically endangered thanks to exploitation of eggs and turtles for food and tortoiseshell and today faces threats like the loss of nesting and feeding habitat by-catch and pollution, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature.
Ariana Oporta-McCarthy, a marine biologist and president of the Costa Rican Alliance for Sea Turtle Conservation & Science (COASTS) says that Gandoca beach, on Costa Rica’s Carribean coast, is one of the main nesting beaches in the country and its populations were being seriously affected by illegal egg collection.
“Thanks to our actions we went from having 100% looting to having almost 0% looting, we have also extracted more than four tons of plastics from the nesting beach, more than 40,000 hatchlings have been released, and more than 500 mangrove trees have been planted,” she says.
In 2020, Oporta-McCarthy and her team re-established a conservation research project to study nesting activities and movement of sea turtle populations at the Gandoca-Manzanillo National Wildlife Refuge and the functional role they play in the oceanic ecosystem, with emphasis on the Hawksbill.
“The main challenge was to start research and conservation after so many years of recess, we knew nothing about the populations, we had to stop looting and build capacity in the village,” she says, adding that the main strength of the project being led by members of the village is that there are high levels of community acceptance for the project.
“What we basically do is to generate scientific skills in the young people of the community, with the help of those more experienced in the field of turtle conservation,” Oporta-McCarthy says, “We do field work, which involves night patrols to safeguard the females and their nests, take scientific information, relocate nests to protect them, daytime censuses in search of hatchlings, exhumations, place satellite transmitters, clean the beach and plant mangroves to restore the habitat.”
Oporta-McCarthy was named a 2022 Fellow of the New England Aquarium’s Marine Conservation Action Fund. This MCAF funding helped her team visit more than 20 schools in the local area to provide environmental education with ten of those visiting the project’s main location, to have the wonderful experience of seeing and releasing turtle hatchlings.
Home Town Turtle Conservation
Oporta-McCarthy grew up in Gandoca, a small rural town in Costa Rica close to the beach, and says during her childhood there was no access to electricity or potable water.
“The beach in my town is an important nesting beach, here were some of the first sea turtle research and conservation projects in the 1990s and since I was a little girl I was involved in them because my close relatives worked there,” she says, “It always seemed exciting to me, to be able to make a living with a conservationist job, especially the field work, the night walks, the contact with the turtles, the sea and nature in general.”
Oporta-McCarthy says her moment of inspiration was when she had the opportunity to see for the first time a majestic adult leatherback turtle nesting.
“I pursued this dream as I grew up, I left my hometown for a few years to study Marine Biology, but always with the dream of being able to return,” she says, adding that in 2013, she was the first from her village to graduate as a biologist and would then co-found her NGO and work towards restarting conservation projects.
“We must put our efforts in being our own heroes in our own backyard, empowering our youth and our children to be agents of change” Oporta-McCarthy says, “We are in continuous contact with our day-to-day realities and we have a lot of innate knowledge that should be used to take action for ourselves and stop waiting for heroes to come to us from outside.”
El Salvador Turtles
On the opposite shore of Central America, Ani Henriquez from El Salvador, has also been been working to help save Hawksbill turtles.
Henriquez, Executive Director of Asociacion Procosta, the first non-profit in El Salvador to works with the conservation and protection of Hawksbill turtles says that the Hawksbills inhabiting the eastern Pacific are among the most endangered and least resilient sea turtle populations on the planet.
“In early 2007 Hawksbill turtles in El Salvador were considered an extinct species, there were few nesting data that was not confirmed, but during this year a research survey from Mexico to Peru was held to understand Hawksbill turtles nesting activity,” she says-
“During the past 10 years we have registered more than 3000 Hawksbill nests and from 0% of protection rate we now have 99% protection rate with help of local communities,” Henriquez says, adding that this information provides an important justification of how important these nesting areas are for Hawksbill turtles populations in the Eastern Pacific.