I bring all this up to caution against overreaction in 

 management efforts. We are manipulators at heart and confident 

 of our skills. We love hatcheries and buckets of baby turtles to 

 carry to the sea. There are even those of us who believe that 

 the goal of temperature modulated sex ratio research is to 

 manipulate the hatchling sex ratios of local populations and, 

 thereby, enhance recovery rates. This should not be so. We must 

 not allow natural nesting beach conditions to be replaced in our 

 management plans with manipulative hatching programs, unless 

 absolutely necessary. For most of us in the WATS area with a sea 

 turtle recovery job to perform, further temperature studies are 

 not needed. Instead, we should protect natural nesting beaches. 

 If hawksbills want bushes under which to nest, then leave the 

 bushes for the purpose. If nests must be relocated, then 

 relocate to a site as similar to natural conditions as possible. 

 For those of us with a zest for curiosity, temperature profiles 

 of the nesting beach provide insight into sea turtle nesting 

 behavior, and we can check to see if our hatchery sites simulate 

 natural thermal conditions as closely as possible. Beyond that, 

 I believe management will be better served in the long run by 

 allowing the sea turtle to make her own choice as to where a nest 

 should be placed and spending our time making sure that her 

 options for choosing a site remain open and not compromised. 



Population Research 



For those of us who work with life tables and predictive 

 population models of sea turtles, the past several decades have 

 been frustrating. Dealing with population models is not easy 

 when bits and pieces of the life history are unknown. Our 

 colleagues who work with more accessible organisms tend to put 

 down our modeling efforts with sea turtles, because we cannot 

 find those elusive hatchlings during Dr. Carr's missing year and, 

 therefore, cannot track their fate from egg to death. However, 

 we know a great deal about many segments of sea turtle life 

 history, and those segments offer much of value for management. 

 Knowledge of certain other segments of the life cycle still elude 

 us but are within our grasp if we initiate vigorous research 

 efforts in their direction. For example, growth rate is probably 

 the parameter of population behavior most urgently needed for 

 management. Growth rates tell us how long it takes a turtle to 

 grow up, how long we must wait for this year's hatchlings to 

 become tomorfow's nesting females, how long it may take to put 

 turtles back into certain Caribbean waters where turtles once 

 roamed but now are no longer found. We know how fast adult 

 female turtles grow; they don't grow at all, or at least not 

 significantly within the lifetime of the researcher taking the 

 measurements. On the other hand, we do not know even a fraction 

 of what we should know about growth rates of juvenile turtles in 

 the wild. My recommendation: tag as many juveniles as possible. 

 Collect growth rates over time as recapture data accumulates. 

 One of these days, a tagged juvenile will crawl up on a beach to 



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