Peter Gros:
In the warm waters off the Florida coast, a green sea turtle propels herself through the ocean with her large paddle-like flippers. At 300 pounds and with a carapace that's almost four feet long, she's remarkably graceful. And today, she started an immense journey. She's leaving her feeding grounds to travel hundreds, maybe thousands of miles back to where she herself was hatched, where she'll mate and lay hundreds of eggs this season. It's a process that is filled with obstacles already, but for the past 60 years, nesting and survival into adulthood has been a minefield for the species. Decades of habitat loss, egg harvesting and overpoaching by humans has dealt a catastrophic blow to green sea turtle populations. By the 1970s, their global numbers had declined by up to 67%. But today, the picture is very different. This is the story of that extraordinary rebound and the international effort to make sure it happened.
Jeff Corwin:
When we lose a species, we lose a little piece of ourselves. We lose a piece of our humanity, our dignity. When we can learn from our mistakes and see this creature that has been here long before humankind has been, by tens of millions of years, and give it a chance to do it as it has done as a species, we are the better for it.
Peter Gros:
Today, we'll hear this remarkable story from Jeff Corwin.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
You likely know Jeff as the host of Emmy winning shows like Wildlife Nation and Ocean Treks. He's a wildlife biologist, a television presenter, an author and a passionate conservationist. Jeff has worked closely with sea turtles across the Americas and in the Caribbean. Welcome to Back From the Brink, from Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom. I'm Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant.
Peter Gros:
And I'm Peter Gros, wildlife expert.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
And in each episode, we're looking at some of the most incredible comeback stories in nature and the people who made it happen.
Peter Gros:
Jeff Corwin has spent over 30 years working with sea turtles around the world. And that time, he's watched something amazing happen. A species that was critically endangered when he started his career is now thriving. But before we get to the compact, we need to understand more about this fascinating animal.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
Welcome, Jeff Corwin. This is so exciting for me.
Jeff Corwin:
Thank you, Rae. I appreciate that.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
Welcome to Back From the Brink.
Jeff Corwin:
Yeah.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
And we could talk about pretty much any species of animal with you, but I actually am very glad that you are going to talk to us about green sea turtles and the trajectory they've had over time.
Jeff Corwin:
Sure.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
And one of the reasons I'm so stoked is because just last December, I had my first experience with a green sea turtle. I was in Costa Rica with Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom protecting the wild. We were doing all kinds of stories, but we were also looking at the different species of sea turtles in that area. And so I got to actually see some up close for the first time, which was really excellent. So I want to know, why is this the species we're talking about? What is it about them that gets you so excited?
Jeff Corwin:
Well, I love sea turtles. And as a kid growing up in New England, we didn't see a lot of sea turtles.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
Yeah, sure.
Jeff Corwin:
And when I was a little boy, my dad was a Boston police officer and he would drop me off at the New England Aquarium. And they were like, "Who's this little seven-year-old, eight-year-old kid here every weekend?" And I knew all the names of the creatures. And before you know it, I was helping them do assessments, health assessments on their only sea turtle, which is Myrtle the Turtle. And she's still there today.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
Is she?
Jeff Corwin:
She's one of the oldest giant well-fed Ruben-esque sea turtles you'll ever see and she's thriving there at the New England Aquarium. But since then, I've had a chance to work with sea turtles all around the world, and I've worked with almost all the sea turtles.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
Okay. For many people out there who are not like you and me and kind of in it with wildlife all the time, a sea turtle is a sea turtle is a sea turtle. So can you talk to me about what a green sea turtle looks like? Is it kind of like how a brown bear is actually brown, or is it more like how a blue whale is kind of blue but a little bit more gray and dark? What does this green sea turtle really look like?
Jeff Corwin:
Well, they don't look green at all.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
Thank you.
Jeff Corwin:
So do you know why they're called green sea turtles?
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
I don't.
Jeff Corwin:
Because of their meat, because when you would eat the flesh, the muscle tissue and fat tissue is green because of all the foraging. They forge in a lot of alginous type material, and they're absorbing that chromatophore type. The pigments, they're absorbing that.
Peter Gros:
The fact that green sea turtles are named for the color of their meat explains why some of their population crashed. Over the course of Jeff's career, he's been a witness to the sea turtles journey and the many factors leading to the crash, and the comeback.
Jeff Corwin:
In my career, I've seen the arc of sea turtles. So I'm going on over 30 years in my career. And when I began my career, sea turtles were very critically endangered. And now, I can see sea turtles when I'm out fishing in the summer off Massachusetts. We have sea turtles.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
No, I didn't know it was that good.
Jeff Corwin:
Yes. So green turtles were critically endangered, loggerheads, critically endangered, leatherbacks, all the sea turtles were critically endangered. Some now are endangered, but loggerheads have drifted their way into threatened status. And green turtles are probably, many scientists would say, are no longer threatened. They're very abundant. And a lot of that came down to was eliminating the hunting of sea turtles because they were a food, and they still are a food, for many people around the world, including Costa Rica. And having this global mission to make people want to protect them, have them sort of be ambassador species that we can love, and then protecting and restoring habitat and protecting the oceans where they foraged is what allowed us to bring them back.
And if you were to go to Boca Raton, for example, 40 years ago, they had a dearth of sea turtles. Just a couple would come up and nest. But now, Boca Raton, Florida is probably the most important nesting site for sea turtles, especially loggerhead sea turtles. But green turtles have made an extraordinary recovery. So in the short term, in the midterm, sea turtles are doing incredibly well. The long term, we don't know because they're facing other challenges. But where I live in New England, because our waters have gotten so warm, and also because they are cleaner than they have been in a hundred years, Boston Harbor was the dirtiest modern urban waterway in the world.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
I believe that.
Jeff Corwin:
It's now the cleanest modern waterway.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
Way to go, Boston.
Jeff Corwin:
It brought back the right whales, but it brought back turtles that now could migrate up because it doesn't get cold. But eventually, it does get cold and they get cold stunned. So we have a whole sea turtle hospital in New England now that back in the day would get five patients a year, and now they get thousands of patients a year. And the other challenge with sea turtles is because the sand is warmer, nests with many species, including green sea turtles, are hatching out about 90% female.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
Oh, interesting because the temperature of... It's like kind of the incubation temperature helps determine the sex of the animal.
Jeff Corwin:
Hotter means girls and colder means guys. And then it's reversed with crocodilians.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
Because why not?
Jeff Corwin:
Why not? Yeah.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
Because that's just how nature is.
Jeff Corwin:
So I don't know how you fix that problem. So on the short term, they're trying to do things like regulate the nest temperature. But truly recovered species are when we can sort of step back and say, like wild turkeys, you're doing it on your own now, you're doing good, or coyotes or other species, American alligators, bald eagles, species that were once almost extinct, but now have recovered to the point where they are doing it on their own.
Peter Gros:
The Endangered Species Act gave the sea turtles legal protection, but law alone doesn't save a species. What happened in Costa Rica showed what protection actually looks like on the ground, and who has to be a part of it.
Jeff Corwin:
The animal plant, we'd go to a market and buy these sea turtles and release them and go out with this guy to buy sea turtles. And Costa Rica, their nesting green turtles and their loggerheads and their leatherbacks had largely crashed because people were both eating the turtles and eating the eggs.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
Wow.
Jeff Corwin:
And once they protected those beaches, they now have so many sea turtles that they will say to the local population, "Please don't eat the sea turtles, but we have managed these nests so well, you can have some of the eggs. You get to have 20% of the eggs."
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
That really speaks to some great recovery because allowing people to use these natural resources in their traditional way is fair and also speaks to how resilient some of these species really can be if they have the right intervention.
Jeff Corwin:
Right. And with sea turtle eggs, there's a lot of cultural importance, especially in Latin America. They would just go and dig up all the eggs. They just didn't have a chance. And once those nests stabilized, they were like, "It's okay, we can share this resource because we're already beating the odds," because it already is a game of numbers for sea turtles. If you're lucky, one in 10,000...
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
Survives.
Jeff Corwin:
... will come back as an adult.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
Walk me through that life cycle from when it's born.
Jeff Corwin:
So when the sea turtle, when the mom, she comes out and she excavates that nest out to deposit her eggs during that season, she'll do multiple nests, and she'll do like a decoy nest to do kind of sloppy that kind of fool the animals.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
Clever.
Jeff Corwin:
The idea is you do multiple nests so your entire clutch isn't lost. And then she's laying between 30 and 70 eggs, a little bigger than a ping pong ball. And then she goes back to sea. When she comes out to nest, she is nesting on the very beach where she was born...
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
Amazing.
Jeff Corwin:
... where her life began. And she is the only time a sea turtle, for the most part, with few places like Hawaii will have this phenomenon of sea turtles that actually will sleep in the beach, most sea turtles become pelagic. A sea turtle born that hatches out on Florida may find its way, we've tracked them to the coast of Africa.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
Oh my gosh.
Jeff Corwin:
Sea turtles from Africa have shown up feeding in the horn of Cape Cod, Massachusetts.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
Incredible.
Jeff Corwin:
So they are incredibly adaptive of using the ocean's currents to go from A to B or go from the new world to the old world.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
And we can find them in all of the oceans, essentially, right?
Jeff Corwin:
We even have some sea turtles that go into the Arctic.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
What?
Jeff Corwin:
We think of sea turtles as being cold-blooded and not being warm-blooded, being endothermic, but they are the only turtle that is megathermic. Because they are so big, they are like their own... They're a closed loop energy system. So the nest is laid there and she will go back to sea. And only the females will come out. Males will spend their whole lives in the ocean.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
At sea. Isn't that something?
Jeff Corwin:
And when they hatch out, if they're lucky enough, if they're that one in 10,000 that survive the flood, that survive that high tide, that survive the coyotes or the raccoons, that survive the ghost crabs and all the fish that will eat them, then they'll come back 20 years later. It will take two decades for that mom to come to the beach, excavate that nest out and bring that next generation in. So that's kind of how the cycle works.
Peter Gros:
The recovery of the green sea turtle didn't happen by accident, it happened because people decided it would. But the threats that nearly wiped them out haven't disappeared, and some new ones have arrived.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
So green sea turtles were listed on the endangered species list. And that made a big difference, at least in the US and in North America, in their protection. And I think it also made a difference worldwide.
Jeff Corwin:
It did because they were protected internationally, the IUCN and other groups. There's still places where people eat green turtles and other sea turtles. The green turtle is the one that's actually eaten the most. People don't eat leatherbacks.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
And they're eating this green meat.
Jeff Corwin:
Yeah.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
I can't get over that.
Jeff Corwin:
But it's like that's what they say is I've been to places where I've seen it being cooked in the streets of Indonesia and other places, but that was the most hunted sea turtle. They would hunt them for their eggs. And sometimes, they would just literally get them all on board, cut them open, remove the eggs. And you can look at those old National Geographic photos, and you don't really see that anymore. But they still face future challenges. One is a warming world, and how do we combat that, and the other are plastics.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
Okay, talk to me about plastics in the ocean.
Jeff Corwin:
Yeah. We dump 10 billion pounds of plastics every year into our oceans. And you can see that as blue as a beautiful bluebird morning in New England. I've been to the Trash Pacific Gyre and I've seen that where you see something that looks like an island that is hundreds of miles in size of this gyro of trash that has all come together. And there are places, beautiful Bali, for example, you go there and every day, because people have spent all this money to be a tourist in beautiful Bali, they have to come in with excavators and front end loaders every morning just to clean the trash off the beach. And that is a preventable thing. It is something we could mitigate. So that's the good news. If we decided we could eliminate almost all of the plastic trash that goes into our oceans, there's a way we could manage that. But it's been documented that one big landscape plastic bag, you know those plastic bags that's really tough, can kill five individual sea turtles before it's broken up enough into little pieces that it could pass through.
And I have been to so many sea turtle hospitals where that is it. So you have them eating plastics, and then off Florida boat strikes, big problem. And then they have diseases that may be the result of climate change, may be the result of pollution. It's a papilloma type virus where they get these tumors. And they'll often get them in and they'll remove the tumors and stuff. So they have challenges. But overall, I don't like to look at things as good news or success. I would say it's a promising story. It's a hopeful story. We are at a place of uncertainty and hope with green sea turtles and all the other sea turtles that we have out there. What I would argue, we are there where we have this out of sight, out of mind, "Oh, we fixed it."
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
Sure.
Jeff Corwin:
We live in a world now where, whether you like it or not, in the last century, humankind has consumed 70 to 80% of all our planets' nature. We, whether we like it or not, have been given this responsibility to be our planets' stewards.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
Yeah.
Jeff Corwin:
And that is something that will always require vigilancy.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
The way I'm interpreting what you're saying is that if you are committed to protecting sea turtles or wildlife, nature at all, it's not a single decision. So it's not just choosing a paper straw over a plastic straw. It's not the right thing to get your paper straw and then the next car you buy is a huge gas guzzler, it is a lifetime kind of readjustment and commitment to these better environmental practices. It is the way you vote. It is the community that you live in. It is bringing a-
Jeff Corwin:
The businesses you support.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
The businesses you support.
Jeff Corwin:
Commerce.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
It's bringing that reusable bag and eliminating single use plastics. It's talking to your friends and family who might not be politically activated to research their candidates. It's the way you travel. It is this commitment. And it's not too hard. That's not to say it's overwhelming and it's too hard. It actually can become-
Jeff Corwin:
Well, if it is too hard, you can't do it. It's not sustainable. So it has to be something that you can achieve reasonably in your life. It's like the 5% rule. It's 5% of everything in your life, to give, to take, to manage, time, talent, treasure. It's that 5%. If everyone did that, that makes a big difference.
Peter Gros:
Conservation classifications tell us where a species stands. They don't tell us how it got there. Jeff has been on the ground for three decades, and his stories say more than status reports ever could.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
I've always believed in these classifications that we have, endangered, critically endangered, vulnerable, threatened, least concerned, et cetera. I think it really helps us to triage conservation work. And at the same time, I think you've made this point, it doesn't necessarily point us to the future. So when we have an animal that is of least concern, they are abundant, maybe they've gone through a lot, but they've arrived at this place where they're doing pretty well, it doesn't actually secure them for a future of abundance. And so I appreciate people like you who have this articulation for, the work isn't done yet.
Jeff Corwin:
And what you have to remember is that creatures that are critically endangered today, or extinct, were once abundant.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
Abundant. There you go.
Jeff Corwin:
Passenger pigeons were abundant. The heathen was very abundant. And that's what created conservation, when we wiped out wild turkey. So again, a sign of success, like where green turtles are today. If you went to New England a hundred years ago, there were no wild turkeys. They were eaten up. There were very few white-tailed deer. And now, these are very abundant species and very abundant resources. And there are places now where turkeys are now worth thriving, but then they're in trouble again because of bird flu and other things. So you're right, we're never really out of the woods where humankind envelops everything with such a completeness. We constantly have to be vigilant. But yes, we have gotten to a point where species like green sea turtles, which were on the brink of disappearing, have recovered swimmingly. And that is something I have experienced in my own life.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
You have been on TV speaking about the power of nature and wildlife conservation for decades, and you've changed so much, you've been hugely influential. Is there a particular sea turtle story that you'd like to share with me that just stands out, either from filming or something that happened off camera?
Jeff Corwin:
There have been so many sea turtle stories.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
I bet, I bet.
Jeff Corwin:
Some mishaps. So we had this sea turtle, this big ridly sea turtle, probably weighed about a hundred pounds and it had lost all four of its flippers.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
Poor thing.
Jeff Corwin:
So we had drained its enclosure to clean it and I was going to go grab the turtle. And I was leaning, talking to my cameraman. I was leaning on the edge of this thing, it's about chest high, and the sea turtle, the water is gone. And it's about half the size of this room. And without any flippers, that sea turtle managed to come over and bite off the tip of my toe.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
Oh my God.
Jeff Corwin:
And I wielded in pain.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
I shouldn't laugh, I shouldn't laugh.
Jeff Corwin:
And I was like, "Oh my gosh." And I turned around and there's blood everywhere and this sea turtle trying to eat my foot.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
I mean, I can't even imagine how it's moving towards you.
Jeff Corwin:
You know how you have one toe that's the longest? It was like whatever toe and it cut off the tip of it. And so I was like, "Man, you're one determined turtle." So that was one story. And then the other story was I was in Borneo and I'd waited all night for this nest to hatch out, we were going to film it hatch out. And lo and behold, it starts to happen and you see them coming out. And it was sunrise coming up and they're going in. It was so beautiful, we're filming it up. And then they're all gone. And then I look at the nest and there's this one straggler. And its flipper's, not deformed, but it's just not right, and it's just the straggler. And you just know it's probably not going to make it. And it was really very emotional for me just to watch this thing kind of trying to keep up with the other guys.
And that was emotional for me to see that.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
Sure. Yeah.
Jeff Corwin:
And so that was one incredible moment, or dealing with these cold stunned sea turtles that have come to New England to eat the bounty of plenty in the oceans. And then winter does come, comes later, but it does come and they get cold [inaudible 00:23:57]. And all of these people, little old ladies coming up, and we found this sea turtle and it was dead. And we brought it back to the center and we had it there. And it was completely cold, it was as cold as the ice. It had no heartbeat, it wasn't breathing. And the scientist said, "I like to wait." But we went back the next day and it had a heartbeat. It was that determined. And we released that turtle back to the wild many months later. So that's the resiliency of nature.
Peter Gros:
The comeback is real, but ask Jeff Corwin why it matters and the answer has nothing to do with data.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
I, just months ago, again in Costa Rica, was waiting on this beach with my co-host and we were waiting for jaguars, waiting for jaguars. And lo and behold, a wave sweeps up and there's a green sea turtle, female obviously, coming onto the sand to lay eggs for her nest. I had been snorkeling with sea turtles before, and so I have seen them just be fast, just super fast in the water and agile and just amazing, hard to keep up with. And she comes in on this wave, riding the wave pretty fast, and then kind of splat on the sand. And then suddenly, I see this massive body just using both of her flippers. And to me, this is a bit of anthropomorphizing...
Jeff Corwin:
I know where you're going with this.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
... the animal, it seemed like she was exhausted. And I'm a mother myself, just mom to mom, I was thinking to myself, she's so tired and she's just trying to get from the shore into the brush where she can lay these eggs. And it just took her like 10 minutes to get somewhere where if she was swimming would've been seconds.
Jeff Corwin:
Right.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
And I just had this compassion and empathy for the sea turtle in that moment thinking to myself, what a labor of love because there are predators on this beach. There are humans on this beach. There are seagulls and all kinds of things to eat her babies or to bother her, and yet she has to make her way with her heavy body to lay the eggs and then make her way back.
Jeff Corwin:
Yeah.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
And I just felt like so much compassion for that experience and for the fact that sea turtles have been perpetuating their species for millennia in the same way, but with the extreme effort.
Jeff Corwin:
For hundreds of millions of years, that sea turtle, when she comes up, this is a creature that's designed to have buoyancy, where all the heaviness of being a 200 pound animal...
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
Disappears in the water.
Jeff Corwin:
... disappears in the water.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
Yeah.
Jeff Corwin:
But then it's like landing on a planet of all that gravity. It has to come out with that heavy gravity and fight with the sand and the bugs. And then she has to excavate a hole that takes some hours to create this pit that's three feet deep, and then give birth. Literally, you can hear them. They sigh and they heave. And then she has to go back to the sea. And she's coming to the very place where her mother brought her into... Dad, he's gone, but she does all that work, but then she is done. And they are on their own. It's a game of numbers. She doesn't need 70 to survive, she needs just one to survive. And that one to survive maybe two or three times in her entire life when you think about it.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
Right, right.
Jeff Corwin:
That's how it works.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
It's really difficult, I think, to be in the presence of a sea turtle and not feel impacted by it somehow. And now that we have so many more sea turtles because conservation has been working, the public has gotten on board, policies have been put in place, we can keep this species, or all of these species alive and around forever.
Jeff Corwin:
It's the reward of investing our time and our energy and our resources to bring this species back because when we lose a species, we lose a little piece of ourselves.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
Yeah.
Jeff Corwin:
We lose a piece of our humanity, our dignity. We have allowed under our watch to lose something that we've been charged to protect as a steward. When we can learn from our mistakes and see this creature that has been here long before humankind has been, by tens of millions of years, and give it a chance to do it as it has done as a species, we are the better for it. So yeah, it's pretty incredible to see that. And sea turtles are a big part of us.
And the other thing that I have come to learn, I think back in the old days, science, and I think it just made it easier to harvest things, we took away emotion from them, complexity. We took away any idea of thinking, and we just say they're hardwired to be. It's all driven by instinct. Well, we now know that especially turtles are far more complex behaviorally. There's stories of sea turtles that have had bonds to people. I have been with sea turtles that I'm like, this creature has taken a shining to me. And I'm not being anthropomorphic. The more you study them, the more we don't know what's going on inside of them.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
Sure. That is such a perfect way to end because it offers us so much interest in what happens next. There's so much more to discover and to know about them, thus, we can't wait to see how good it can get with sea turtles around the world.
Jeff Corwin:
Yeah. In a world where there's not a lot of good news, this is a good news story. It's also a gateway animal. It's a creature that can be a part of your life in a meaningful way, that can be your gateway to developing a connection and a relationship with our natural world.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
Jeff Corwin, I have to thank you for coming onto Back From the Brink and talking to us about how sea turtles have come back from the brink and how we are responsible for their future moving forward.
Jeff Corwin:
Yeah.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
It has been an amazing conversation and I have to thank you so much.
Jeff Corwin:
Thank you. It was fun.
Peter Gros:
From the edge of extinction to beaches full of nests, from boats loaded with harvested turtles to Boca Raton becoming one of the most important nesting sites on earth, the sea turtle didn't just survive, it became proof that when people choose to protect something, nature will do the rest. Green sea turtles have been making this journey for hundreds of millions of years, long before humans arrived on these shores. They're still here because of laws passed, beaches protected, and communities that decided this animal was worth fighting for. The work isn't done, but out there, the turtle is still swimming free in the wild oceans once again. This is Back From the Brink, from Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
If you loved this episode and it sparked something in you, please follow or subscribe, leave a review, and send this episode to the turtle lover in your life. I'm Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant, and I'll see you next time.
