nestings in Florida in 1979, 9 in 1980, 39 in 1981, 45 in 1982 

 and 31 in 1983. Possibly the northernmost record in the western 

 Atlantic, an individual that nested in Flagler County, Florida, 

 about 10 km north of the 1947 record, on May 29, 1983, was 

 reported by Nichols and du Toit (unpub. ms) . The specimen 

 reported on a beach near Panama City, Florida, in the summer of 

 1968 (Pritchard 1971) did not nest; but Yerger (1965) reported 

 hatchlings on the beach in Walton County Florida, and this 

 appears to be the northernmost nesting record for the Gulf of 

 Mexico. 



The first report of a major nesting area for Dermochelys in 

 the western Atlantic was that of Carr and Ogren (1959) , who 

 identified an area of coast around Matina, Costa Rica, on which 

 the species nested in considerable numbers. Since then, a number 

 of major and minor nesting areas in the western Atlantic and 

 Caribbean have been identified, and our current concept of the 

 nesting distribution of the species in the WATS region is as 

 follows: 



Nesting is scarce on the North American mainland, with 

 only the above-mentioned records for Florida. Nesting is 

 rare to non-existent on the Gulf and Caribbean coasts of 

 Mexico and Belize, but occurs on the short Caribbean coast 

 of Guatemala (J. Richardson, pers. comm.). Elsewhere in 

 Caribbean Central America, there is a zone of concentrated 

 nesting activity extending from north-central Costa Rica 

 (vicinity of Parismina) through Panama to the Golfo de 

 Uraba', Colombia. In Panama, concentrated nesting occurs 

 both in the western sector, in Bocas del Toro (principally 

 on Playa Chirigui') , and also in eastern Panama, at Playa 

 Pito and Bahia Aglatomate (McAlpine 1980; Meylan et al. 

 1985) . Further east in Colombia, nesting has been reported 

 on the Santa Marta Peninsula, in relatively small numbers. 



Almost no nesting occurs on the coast of Venezuela 

 (Pritchard and Trebbau 1984) , but in Trinidad important nesting 

 is found on both the northern and eastern coasts (Pritchard 

 1984b) . In northwestern Guyana a moderate amount of nesting 

 occurs, mainly at Almond Beach (Pritchard 1987) , although in past 

 decades nesting occurred farther to the southeast, mainly on 

 Shell Beach. Nesting is unknown in eastern Guyana or western 

 Surinam, but in eastern Surinam and western French Guiana are 

 found perhaps the highest concentrations of nesting leatherbacks 

 in the hemisphere (Schulz 1975; Fretey and Lescure 1979) . 

 Farther to the east and south, in Brazil, nesting is very sparse, 

 and the only beach identified by R. Heimark (in letters to S. 

 Beebe, May 1984) as still showing leatherback nesting activity 

 was a 12 mile beach in Espirito Santo, unfortunately adjacent to 

 a Funai Indian relocation camp. 



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