We're getting ready for our first-ever harbor clean up in San Juan del Sur. Along with the usual coastline clean-up crews, we'll be working with teams of boaters and divers to pull up, haul away, and inventory inorganic waste on the bottom of the bay (presumably mostly abandoned nets and traps). Wokring with the Municipality of San Juan del Sur, the Reef Foundation, and San Juan del Sur CANTUR, we'll...
Julie Martinez, our environmental education instructor, has been working with elementary school kids in the Rivas province of Nicaragua. The kids are learning about the ecology of tropical dry forests, and starting to address environmental problems in their own community.
We are pleased to partner with Flora and Fauna International on a public awareness campaign to discourage the consumption of sea turtle eggs. We are surveying restaurants and market vendors, and asking them to commit to stop selling turtle eggs. We also visit schools to promote sea turtle protection.
We've officially launched our sea turtle program in the Rivas province, and La Prensa picked it up to share the story with the rest of Nicaragua. The campaign, designed to protect critically endangered sea turtles who nest on the beaches of Nicaragua, include environmental education, water conservation, eco-tourism, and local development. It also includes a sea turtle incentive payment program described by country director Liza González: Es un programa de...
Over at the Cantur San Juan del Sur blog, they're helping us gear up for Earth Day, by advertising our first ever Earth Day Forum. We'll be in San Juan del Sur, "a small place on this wonderful planet Earth, endowed with exceptional and endless beauty" April 22nd and 23rd, making it Nicaragua's Earth Day headquarters. The goal of the event is to celebrate the natural beauty of the region...
Our parrot video is now available in English!
Please watch our video addressing the issue of poaching parrots in Nicaragua. Once abundant in tropical forests, the Yellow-naped parrot (Lora Nuca Amarillo in Spanish) is increasingly rare in Nicaragua, where habitat destruction and poaching have reduced its numbers rapidly. Poachers are often young rural farmers who climb over 15 meters into trees or chop down trees to take parrot chicks out of their nests. Yellow-naped parrots only have one...
We're so pleased with the level of involvement at our community meeting in Ostional, where we have launched an initiative which includes environmental education, a sea turtle incentive payment program, and kayak guides to take eco-tourists through the mangroves.
The Ostional community guides spent the weekend at Las Galerias Mall in Managua to share their story and to promote Ostional as a tourism destination. Guided tours range from bird-watching hikes, to sea-kayaking trips. All guides (first four young women on the left) are young members of the local community. They are proud to know that they will benefit from ecological tourism.
January's Science roundup included interesting work on coral reefs: Compiling geological and biological data from fossils, a team of evolutionary scientists has found indications of the following: reefs are important evolutionary cradles independent of their preferred habitat in shallow, tropical environments in nonreefal ecosystems, shallow-water environments represent the most important evolutionary cradles Understanding reefs will help us understand populations of sea turtles and other marine wildlife as reefs face the...
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