{"id":14773,"date":"2017-04-26T14:28:30","date_gmt":"2017-04-26T18:28:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.canadahelps.org\/?p=14773\/"},"modified":"2024-11-01T16:41:11","modified_gmt":"2024-11-01T20:41:11","slug":"lessons-from-leatherbacks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.canadahelps.org\/en\/giving-life\/connecting-with-charities\/lessons-from-leatherbacks\/","title":{"rendered":"Lessons from Leatherbacks"},"content":{"rendered":"

Charity Spotlight: This blog post is part of our charity spotlight series and was provided by Kathleen Martin, Executive Director of the Canadian Sea Turtle Network.<\/strong><\/h4>\n

Most people don\u2019t mark World Turtle Day on their calendars, but it\u2019s a favourite of mine. Growing up, I wasn\u2019t the kid lifting up rocks looking for salamanders or slipping a net stealthily into a pond to examine a minnow. I was the kid sitting up in a birch tree, reading a book. I liked animals and nature but I didn\u2019t think about them carefully. So when I found myself working with endangered sea turtles, I had a lot to learn, and it wasn\u2019t just the details of biology.
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\u201cWhat happens if leatherback sea turtles go extinct?\u201d I asked Mike James, now a sea turtle scientist, but who was then a graduate student. \u201cIf they don\u2019t give people anything\u2014if they don\u2019t do anything to help us\u2014what do we lose?\u201d<\/p>\n

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Mike looked over at me and the room became quiet. \u201cIt\u2019s not all about us,\u201d he said. \u201cThe world isn\u2019t just about humans.\u201d<\/p>\n

Something shifted into place for me. The world became bigger. Suddenly I was part of it, standing on the inside, instead of looking at it from the outside.<\/p>\n

So Many Millennia, so Many Mysteries<\/h2>\n

Leatherbacks are amazing animals. They are the biggest sea turtle in the world, growing to be more than two metres in length and routinely weighing more than 400 kilograms. They can dive deeper than a kilometre and can hold their breath for more than an hour. They migrate further than any other reptile in the world. You\u2019d think we\u2019d know all there is to know about leatherback sea turtles by now, but we don\u2019t. They\u2019ve been on our planet for more than 150 million years. When T. Rex roamed the earth, the leatherback\u2019s ancestors swam in the oceans.<\/p>\n

But it wasn\u2019t until 1998, when we started studying leatherbacks off Nova Scotia with the help of commercial fishermen, that scientists learned definitively that these animals were routine visitors to Atlantic Canadian waters. Before that, most scientists couldn\u2019t imagine that leatherbacks\u2014which nest in the tropics\u2014would have any reason to be way up here. It turns out that they swim thousands of kilometers annually to feed on jellyfish off our coast. Our work has shown that Canadian waters are actually among the most important feeding grounds for leatherbacks in the world.<\/p>\n

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But scientists still don\u2019t know lots of seemingly simple things, like how many years a leatherback can live, or where hatchling leatherbacks go from the time they first scramble to the ocean until they have grown to be longer than a metre.<\/p>\n

Leatherbacks remind us that there is a lot to learn. That with all we know and can do as humans, we don\u2019t have the full picture. Not by a long shot.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s Kind of Like Jazz<\/h2>\n

There are many, many reasons at this point in history to be concerned about the environment. I could add to that long list of worries photographic evidence of sea turtles wrapped up in rope and drowned in fishing gear\u2014or sliced up by poachers on nesting beaches. But I don\u2019t think that this is always helpful. Sometimes, we operate from a place of anger or fear and it is effective, but I think we do best when we operate from a place of curiosity and hope.<\/p>\n

Fishermen told us about the leatherbacks they saw because they were curious about the ocean and what is in it. By engaging with what interested them, even a little\u2014just writing down a sighting location or snapping a photograph\u2014they helped rewrite the world\u2019s understanding of this ancient species. I think we shouldn\u2019t underestimate the impact of curiosity, of taking a moment to follow the thread of what interests us in a conscious way.<\/p>\n