The Shark-Free Marina Initiative

Their motto is, "Reducing worldwide shark mortality, one marina at a time."

Here are the basics: A shark-free marina does not allow shark to be killed and landed at their facility. Through the Shark-Free Marina Initiative, businesses are able to register as shark-free and mandate that no caught shark is allowed on their docks. In some states, fishing for shark is still legal ( so the initiative also allows businesses to register as shark-friendly. A shark-friendly business asks fishermen to release caught shark, and strongly discourages international shark fishing.

Why do people kill sharks?

Shark fin soup is a traditional Chinese dish served at weddings, symbolizing wealth, power, and honor. An estimated 70 million sharks were caught and traded last year. Due to its cultural importance, the demand for shark fin soup still remains despite having significant impacts on diminishing shark populations. Hawai'i was the first state in the U.S. to ban shark fin soup, and now the Oregon House just passed a bill to ban it. Hopefully other states will follow suit?

In addition to soup shark is prepared in other ways, but soup is the main problem because fishermen will catch a shark, chop off its fins, and throw it back out to the ocean to bleed and die.

Personally, the thought of eating it makes me gag.

© Fiona Ayerst/Marine Photobank

Sharks are also being thoughtlessly murdered as bycatch in fisheries. The target species may be tuna or swordfish, but fishing methods are not species specific. Therefore sharks, dolphins, whales, seals, sea turtles, and marine birds are all caught unintentionally.

What will happen if all the sharks are gone?

Total ecosystem collapse. Sharks are a keystone species, and regulate populations of other marine animals such as stingrays and various fish. If the populations of these prey organisms grow out of control, the ecosystem becomes imbalanced. 

I will attempt to explain:

No sharks/top predators --> More prey --> Prey animals eat more smaller animals (like crab/shrimp/scallops/smaller fish) --> Prey populations explode --> Prey populations eat ALL of the smaller animals --> No more shrimp or scallops for anyone (including humans) --> prey populations die --> this trend continues down the food chain until ecosystem reaches zero productivity.

I hope that made sense. Long story short, sharks and other top-predators like tuna and carnivorous whales are incredibly important to oceans worldwide. 

People are beginning to learn that sharks really aren't as dangerous as the Hollywood movies portray them to be. They're actually more dangerous to you if you eat them: shark is known to have high levels of mercury and toxins due to biomagnification. 

Watch the PSA:

Click here for the IUCN Red List of Threatened Sharks.

How can you help?
You can do your part to keep sharks on this planet by choosing smart, sustainably caught seafood. Avoid tuna or swordfish unless they were caught with a pole by a local fisherman. Ideally you want to stay away from any fish caught using gillnets, and avoid eating shrimp caught with shrimp trawls!
Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch

Bill Nye's Climate Lab!

Find the website here.

Bill Nye the Science Guy has been a hero of mine for as long as I can remember seeing his shows on TV and in grade school classrooms. He's now got this cool new website "Bill's Climate Lab" to show how everyone can make a difference in the fight against global climate change. It's really neat!

At first I thought it would be lots of "kids stuff" I already knew, but it actually has some pretty solid science and I realized it is actually more focused for adults more than kids.
Bill Nye is the coolest, ever!

Earth Overshoot Day

I found this article on Wikipedia about Earth Overshoot Day or Ecological Debt Day. Basically it is the day each year where the people of Earth enter a period of "deficit spending" of natural resources. Each year the date falls earlier and earlier, signifying humanity's overconsumption of Earth's available natural resources. What happens when we get to Jan 01? How long does humanity have left, really?

Not to scare you or anything.

The Ecological Debt Day for 2010 was August 21; 2009 was September 25.

Time to start practicing sustainability!

Loggerheads!

Loggerheads (Caretta caretta)

The United States Govt. recently has failed to increase protections for the endangered loggerhead sea turtles, despite overwhelming evidence. It is estimated their Pacific populations have dropped by over 80%, and may soon face extinction in the 21^st century.

Click here for the press release from the Sea Turtle Restoration Project, Oceana, and the Center for Biological Diversity.

Appearance: Reddish-brown in color, with giant heads and powerful jaws, they weigh around 250 lbs and can grow to 4 feet long.

Locations: Found worldwide in warm and temperate ocean waters, and are the most common sea turtles found in the United States. The most important nesting beaches are on South Florida beaches (U.S.) and on Masirah Island (Oman).

The western coast of the United States is a significant migratory corridor for Pacific loggerheads. Pacific loggerheads will swim across the Pacific to California’s coast from their main breeding grounds in Japan. Baja California is an important area for loggerhead congregation.

Reproduction: They don’t reach sexual maturity until they’re between 20-30 years old, another reason why their populations have been suffering. Too many are killed before they’ve had a chance to mate and lay eggs. Females can lay three or more nests during the nesting season! Even so, of every 1,000 to 10,000 juvenile turtles that hatch, only two will grow up to become an adult.

Food: crabs, fish, mollusks, jellyfish, sea urchins, sponges and shrimp

Threats: Threats are pretty much the same for all sea turtle species: fishing gear-related incidents, loss of nesting habitat, bright artificial coastal city lights, boat collisions, accidental ingestion of or entanglement in plastic and marine debris, poaching and global warming.

According to the US Fish and Wildlife Service, drowning or entanglement in longline fishing gear from commercial fisheries is a primary danger to the loggerheads.

Random Fact: The loggerhead is the state reptile of South Carolina and Florida

*Other General Sea Turtle Fact: The sex of sea turtle babies is dependant on temperature. The turtles that are closer to the surface (warmer) will develop as females, and the deeper eggs (colder) will develop into males. With global warming and climate change, the ratios have begun favoring higher numbers of female turtles.

Let's keep these guys from extinction! Every small effort makes a difference in marine conservation! Start out simple by using reusable grocery bags or reducing your driving.

Peace,Love&Sea Turtles!!

Also, P.S.—To whom it may concern, don't be mad I don't mean to steal this pic, I just found it on google image search.

My POV: UBC's Animal Testing of Sea Turtles

So this news has been spreading all over the place lately, and I just wanted to get a few of my own thoughts out there. At first, I was outraged by this article. But then I soon realized that A) most of it was exaggerated or false, and B) There are more important matters at hand.

Once upon a time, at the University of British Columbia in Canada, there were a few scientists that received sixteen captive bred, green sea turtles from the Cayman Turtle Farm in the Cayman Islands. Two of them died. Seven are now at other facilities. Now they have seven. The facility where they were housed for the past 10 years is being demolished and they have no where else to go, so a decision was made to terminate them and harvest their tissues for research purposes, after all they are a research facility.

Here's the thing: Animals bred in captivity can never be released into the wild because they pick up parasites and such that would devastate the wild sea turtle populations. With that said, these seven turtles will not be able to make a contribution to the growth of wild green sea turtle populations. Their only option for life is to be kept in a tank and poked at by scientists.

Of course, for any of us crazy sea turtle loving people it is tragically sad to see these turtles killed for scientific research, especially the invasive and disturbing methods used in UBC research labs. Sure, UBC has highly questionable and unethical methods of research with animals (vivisection, for example, absolutely disgusting, torturous and absurd); however, in the long run these turtles are not a big deal to the global green sea turtle populations.

What I cannot seem to understand is why these UBC turtles are so significant, when all the other thousands of sea turtles out in the wild are forgotten.

Over 4,000 turtles were affected by the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Shrimp trawlers in the Gulf of Mexico kill over 25,000 sea turtles every year. Floating plastic waste in the ocean harms and kills 100,000 sea turtles and marine mammals every year. Between 2001 and 2008, the Florida East Coast pelagic longline fleet snared 4,839 loggerheads and 6,626 leatherbacks for a total of 11,465 animals. Turtles are illegally slaughtered and their eggs are stolen and sold on the black market. We constantly destroy their habitats for luxurious beachfront properties and for new gas and oil plants to be built.

Apparently the hundreds of thousands of turtles that die each year in the wild do not matter. We only care about these seven in captivity that will never swim in the open ocean. So I will please ask, won't everyone stop wasting their time fussing over UBC's green sea turtles and do something about the dwindling numbers of sea turtles left in the ocean? Please?

The Heartbreak Turtle Today, a documentary

Ever since I started my internship here at STRP I have been primarily working on outreach for this educational documentary, The Heartbreak Turtle Today. On day 1 of my internship I watched this film 2 or 3 times, and began work on a press kit to be sent along with DVD copies to PBS stations across the country. Since then we've sent it out to 14 PBS stations in Washington, Oregon, California, Florida, Georgia, and Mississippi, as well as 4 local access stations in Florida. And I've still got 60 more local access networks to contact that I haven't gotten around to yet.

I literally just got off the phone with a producer for one of the local PBS stations here in CA, and he said that he wants to show The Heartbreak Turtle Today on the anniversary of the BP oil spill. Which is AWESOME :) !!!!!

I think it really shows that community and local efforts can make a huge difference. Really touching stuff. I don't want people to think that they have to be in the Gulf of Mexico to make a difference when it comes to sea turtle and marine life conservation. Even if you are in the landlocked Midwest (hello, mi familia) you still have a tremendous impact on important conservation matters such as fossil fuel use, plastic use and recycling. So don't think you aren't important! Everyone matters!

Here's a bit more info on the movie:

You can see a preview here.

The Heartbreak Turtle Today is the story of the dramatic recovery of the endangered Kemp’s ridley sea turtles in the Gulf of Mexico. Kemp's ridley sea turtles are the smallest and most critically endangered of all seven species of sea turtles in the world. In 1985 it was estimated that there were about 500 nesting females in the Gulf of Mexico, and now conservation efforts have helped their population grow to about 8,000 nesting females. Such a great improvement!

This documentary was produced by the Sea Turtle Restoration Project and Sunset Productions in order to show the efforts being made to help bring this population of sea turtles back from near extinction. The BP oil spill occurred in the middle stages of film production, and we get a closer look at the devastating after-effects through this moving documentary.

If you are in the Northern SF Bay Area and want to see this film, we've got a public premiere showing happening on March 29 at 7:00 pm at the Bay Model Visitor Center. The film will be followed by an interactive Q&A sesh and presentation on more local CA conservation efforts, it should be fun! So come join us!

Hopefully you'll see The Heartbreak Turtle Today on your local PBS station soon! :)