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Meet a bat we didn’t know existed in Nicaragua, follow a tagged sea turtle, and help us name the next turtle we tag.
Conservation in Action
On the night of June 27 on Brasilon beach in southwestern Nicaragua, a green sea turtle hauled herself ashore, dragged herself up the beach to the treeline, dug her nest, laid her eggs, and went on a walkabout.
As she began winding down, Paso Pacifico’s turtle rangers covered the green turtle’s eyes (turtles are very sensitive to light) and held her in place long enough to attach a SPOT5 satellite transmitter to her shell. Named Saralisa after Paso Pacifico’s founders and directors Sarah Otterstrom and Liza Gonzalez, you can follow this green sea turtle — who has traveled all the way to Oaxaca, Mexico — on her tracking page at seaturtle.org.
Read more about Saralisa, her contributions to science, and more in our August newsletter.
Act Now!
Donate today and help us name the next turtle we tag.
In yesterday’s Arizona Daily Sun:
NAU School of Forestry wildlife ecology professor Carol Chambers, and Nicaraguan bat expert Arnulfo Ramon Medina Fitoria netted, measured, weighed and documented the only Phylloderma stenops bat ever captured and recorded in the Central American country. This particular bat weighs about as much as 20 Hershey’s kisses and usually is captured in mist nets above streams in evergreen forests.
Learn more about our research on bats by visiting our website or reading other bat posts on our blog.
Learn more about partner organization Bat Conservation International.
The California state Senate voted this week to make the endangered Pacific leatherback sea turtle the official marine reptile of California. Assuming Governor Jerry Brown signs the legislation into law, October 15th will officially be Leatherback Conservation Day in the state of California. Mark your calendars!
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| Paso Pacifico’s head turtle ranger, Salvador Sanchez, inspects a leatherback turtle on one of the beaches where we work to protect sea turtle nests. |
Every year leatherbacks migrate from the warmer waters off the coast of Central America where they nest to colder waters off California’s coast where they feed on jellyfish. Considering our US headquarters are located in Ventura and the turtle nesting beaches we protect are in Nicaragua, the symbolism of the leatherbacks’ annual migration is especially meaningful to us. We’ll be looking to partner with other conservation organizations to observe the first ever Leatherback Conservation Day in California.
Please contact us if you’re interested in recognizing Leatherback Conservation Day: wendy (at) pasopacifico.org
Our friends at the Turtle Conservancy have launched The Tortoise, their new magazine dedicated to the appreciation and conservation of tortoises and turtles and their habitats worldwide.
“Turtles and tortoises have been on our earth for more than 200 million years, before the great dinosaurs roamed the planet, and today they face unprecedented challenges for their survival. No vertebrate Order has a greater percentage of species facing extinction. This publication is about the wonder of turtles and tortoises and about the conservation challenges they face,” says Eric Goode, one of the magazine editors and President of the Turtle Conservancy.
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| A team from Bats Conservation International, Paso Pacifico, and MARENA studies bats at Volcano Masaya National Park. |
Bats are essential to ecosystem health and their populations are dwindling around the world, so it is important to understand individual bat species, bat populations, and, of course, the reasons for their decline. In Nicaragua, we study bat populations and their insect diets because we’re considered not just with ecological health, but also with the economic success of Nicaraguan farmers who rely on bats to perform ecosystem services ranging from pollination to pet control.
In the Paso del Istmo biological corridor where we work, there are at least 44 species of bat, which we identify using night photography and by collecting bat guano. By analyzing the DNA in bat excrement, we gather information about what bat species are present and what species of insect they’ve been consuming.
In Europe, scientists analyze bat calls to understand the various species and their migration patterns. As evolutionary biologist, Kate Jones, of the Zoological Society of London writes at the Independent, “bats leak information about themselves into their environment by emitting high frequency sound – echolocation calls – to navigate and find food. We can record this sound in standardised ways and identify the species from its call to track changes in bat populations over time.”
Jones runs iBats — the Indicator Bats Program, which helps citizen scientists contribute to biodiversity monitoring for the global conservation community. International monitoring efforts allowed scientists to track bats’ migration across borders, but difficulty differentiating among various bat calls meant dispersed data sets were hard to compare. Jones and her team are changing that, developing “an identification system that can be used by anybody.”
Their new iBatsID technology, presented today in the British Ecological Society’s Journal of Applied Technology, “is able to correctly identify most European bat species 80 per cent or more of the time,” making data sets more reliable and easier to compare. Better understanding leads to more effective conservation efforts, so iBatsID is good news for bat scientists, bats, and the people who rely on the ecosystem services bats provide.
To get a better idea of what bat calls sound like, listen this piece from this week’s Sunday Weekend Edition on NPR:
For the past five years, bats have been disappearing at an alarming rate, falling prey to a mysterious disease called white-nose syndrome. But they’re making an eerie comeback in a new audio exhibit at a national park in Vermont. The exhibit features manipulated recordings of bat calls that are funneled through glass vessels hanging from a studio ceiling.
Bats emit high-frequency sounds that create echoes to help them navigate and detect predators. Most of these sounds are inaudible to the human ear, but they can be recorded using special machines and software that lower the frequencies into the range humans can hear.
In Nicaragua, we’ve been monitoring bat calls ourselves. Working with our partners at Bat Conservation International, we’ve been placing AnaBat systems to record and monitor bat activity across the Paso del Istmo. Rangers at Masaya National Park (like the one pictured above) will share what we learn from our monitoring with visitors and encourage them to help us protect bats and their habitat.
With coverage like the pieces above, we’re optimistic about the future of bats. Understanding the economic and ecological importance of our flying mammalian friends, and recruiting citizen scientists, are important steps in bat conservation.
You can contribute to our bat conservation efforts by making a donation today.
Saralisa, the green sea turtle we tagged in June, is off the coast of El Salvador. She has traveled a long way and is now in the waters where two of the turtles recently tagged by ICAPO have run into trouble. One was blown up by dynamite fishing, the other caught in a fishing net (illustrating the importance of sustainable fisheries).
We’ll be watching Saralisa very closely over the next few days. You can track her progress with us at seaturtle.org.
On July 14th the International Surfing Association World Masters Surfing Championship opened on Playa Colorado, Nicaragua, bringing the world’s best surfers, surfing fans, and international media to the region where we work.
Surfwire described Playa Colorado as “a place where the jungle met the sand and the Howler Monkeys offered early-morning wake-up calls” giving the international visitors “a first-hand opportunity to see and be a part of a surf culture on the rise.”
Gold Medal Team Hawaii knows a thing or two about surf culture, having invented the sport and shared it with the world. “I’m really stoked for the Hawaiian team,” said women’s gold medalist Rochelle Ballard. “This whole event has been about that, sharing our Aloha and our passion…I love that spirit of sharing; it’s really inspiring.”
Hawaii deserves congratulations for their medals and for their work in protecting the Hawaiian subpopulation of the green sea turtle or honu, whose IUCN Red List status was updated this month to species of least concern.
The IUCN’s (International Union for Conservation of Nature) new honu status is the result of decades of research and conservation in Hawaii that “allowed the population to recover, and gives hope to the recovery of depleted marine turtle populations in other parts of the world.”
To everyone in the international surfing community, and especially to our friends in Hawaii, felicidades, congratulations, gracias, thank you, and mahalo!
This is our home all week for the International Surf Association’s World Masters Surfing Championship.
Here, in part, thanks to the SIMA Environmental Fund, which supports our Surf Ambassadors program for ocean conservation, we’re helping with event logistics and making sure the environmental impact is minimal. Working with our RENISA and our Proyecto TESON partners at Comunidad Connect and Cafe Las Flores, we’re patrolling the beach all day for litter. Playa Colorado is an important nesting beach and it’s turtle nesting season, so two of our star rangers are here to patrol the beach at night for turtles.
Working in the surfing community for a few years to help ensure the local surfing community upholds the international tradition of combining a love of the waves with a commitment to clean oceans, we’re excited about what this event means for coastal Nicaragua.
As reported at ESPN, “surfing, like any sport, can be a powerful mechanism for change. The people of Nicaragua are hoping this is the case.”
We’re pleased to join ISA in working “for the conservation and improvement of coastal environments and the protecting of surfing resources worldwide.”
Fifteen years ago the hawksbill sea turtle in my hands would have been hog-tied, whisked hundreds of miles, slaughtered and carved into trinkets.
Now, it swims free.
On Baja’s Pacific coast, an adult male hawksbill sea turtle found its way into a fisherman’s net. In the past, for the fisherman anyway, such a thing would have been considered a stroke of good luck. The endless demand for turtle meat, eggs, skin and shell on the black market can provide a nice payday to anyone willing to endure the low-level risk of being caught.
Hawksbill turtles, once common, are now the rarest of the rare due to decades of being hunted for their beautiful shells, which get carved into combs, broaches, and other adornments.
These days, however, a Mexican grassroots conservation movement called GrupoTortuguero.org has challenged the old ways and shaken things up a bit. A network of thousands of fishermen, women and children count themselves among its ranks.
Among the fishermen working to save turtles, is Julio Solis, featured in this short film.
Julio Solis, A MoveShake Story from RED REEL on Vimeo.
Wallace J. Nichols, Brad Nahill, and the team at SEE Turtles and SEEtheWILD chronicle efforts to save endangered sea turtles in the inaugural issue of WildHope, their new online magazine.