FivAtiv= Harvest of nesting females 



Number of females nesting annually 

 and returning to sea 



Management Research Needs 



The research needs outlined below are in keeping with a 

 conservative, simple and low-risk approach to sea turtle 

 management. Consequently, many of these needs will share a 

 common philosophy — that is, employ research methodologies which 

 promote accessibility to critical data under conditions which 

 permit the investigator as much experimental control as possible. 

 Meylan (1982) recommended that nesting beaches were the only 

 practical place to conduct censuses of sea turtles. Data 

 collection programs staged on a nesting beach permit 

 characterization of egg harvest, exploitation of hatchlings (if 

 any) , and adult harvest for use in estimating F for each of these 

 stages as well as recording other life history information (i.e., 

 sex ratio, nesting frequency, nesting fidelity, etc.). Research 

 needs identified herein will be more easily met at major, well 

 studied and well established nesting beaches that exhibit 

 increased potential for yielding accessible data. Beaches such 

 as those at Rancho Nuevo, Cumberland Island and Tortuguero are 

 prime examples where research programs have been able to collect 

 large quantities of data from readily accessible turtles and 

 nests. Continued research on beaches such as these and the 

 identification of others suitable for study are critical to 

 estimating loss rates of sea turtles and eggs on nesting beaches. 

 Other shore-based collection programs such as stranding and 

 salvage networks may operate on and away from nesting beaches to 

 provide relatively inexpensive information on sea turtle 

 mortality (both F and M) . 



Specific research needs quantifying fishing mortality on sea 

 turtle stocks are presented below. These needs are addressed by 

 life history stage and the estimation of F^. 



Egg mortality ; The ultimate research need pertinent to 

 sound management at the egg stage and stages thereafter is 

 identifying the number of hatchlings needed to produce one 

 nesting female under conditions of no exploitation (whether 

 directed or incidental) and under various levels of exploitation. 

 This assumes the untested hypothesis that hatchlings produced on 

 a given beach return there to reproduce as adults through some 

 homing instinct. If true, management strategy becomes one of 

 determining optimum size of the nesting stock needed to assure 

 stability and renewal of the sea turtle subpopulation that 

 reproduces on a given beach. At present, this research need 

 probably cannot be met with available information and technology 

 because the stocks are already depressed by overexploitation. 

 However, the impact of exploitation of eggs (Fj) on generating a 



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