Seaturtle org5/8/2023 ![]() The question is why this might be happening. Nel and colleagues report that while both species receive the same type of protection on the nesting beach, the trends in nest numbers are different: loggerhead nest numbers have increased over time, while leatherback nests have oscillated with a decreasing trend in recent years. This is an ideal dataset to analyze, because it is one of the longest running sea turtle monitoring projects in the world, having been established in the 1960s. In a recent paper, Nel and colleagues look at trends in nests laid by leatherbacks and loggerheads that share the same nesting area in northeastern South Africa. The assumption is that an increasing trend in the number of nests laid on a nesting beach is an index of successful management, and there have been several examples of increasing trends in number of nests linked to protection in the published literature (Garcia et al., 2003 Dutton et al., 2005 Marcovaldi & Chaloupka, 2007). As a result, many sea turtle nesting beaches have received some form of protection, ranging from basic restrictions such as marking of nests containing incubating eggs, to more stringent protections such as limiting, or even banning, human access to the beach, in addition to other conservation measures such as relocating eggs that would otherwise be lost to erosion or removing egg predators. This makes logistical sense, as nesting females, their incubating eggs and the emergent hatchlings are much more accessible to conservationists than freely swimming turtles in the ocean. Sea turtle conservation historically has had a biased focus on protecting sea turtles at nesting beaches.
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