The recovery is a result of decades of protection and monitoring.
When Jeanne Mortimer first came out to Aldabra Atoll in the Seychelles to survey endangered green turtles, there was barely any activity. She would walk the 1.2-mile stretch of beach and encounter one, maybe two, turtle tracks. It was the early 1980s, more than a decade since the island banned turtle hunting in 1968, and there was still little sign of recovery for the hard-shelled creatures.
“The fact that we’re at around 3,000 to 5,000 now, which is already so much more than there were in the 1960s, implies that there’s potential for this population to double, triple—we’re not even sure,” Pritchard says. “This could just be the start. It’s amazing that, after slower growth at the beginning, there’s been this real explosion in recent years.”
What’s equally important is the dedication and patience required to sustain long-term monitoring. For a species like the green turtle, which takesto reach sexual maturity and reproduce, long-term data is crucial since conservation work will not show instant results. If it weren’t for the hundreds of people who gathered decades of data across Aldabra’s more than 50 beaches, it would have been difficult to track the progress made in turtle conservation, Pritchard says.
“Turtles are really important to human societies wherever you look—people either want to eat them or worship them,” Mortimer says. “So if you want to work in turtle conservation, you also have to study people. If you can kind of understand why people are using the resource, then you can try to think of ways to change the use of it in a way that still benefits the people but without detriment to the resource.