 Thanks, I'm Sean, I'm from the Nature Center here. Thanks for coming out tonight to hear about something decidedly more tropical than what we're going to experience out the windows here for the next six months. So it's really a pleasure to have Elliot here tonight and tell us about his story with these animals and with conserving them. I have a couple of quick announcements I wanted to mention that I think would be of interest to this particular crowd here. So first of all, all of the proceeds, all of the donations, all of the everything that comes in for tonight, whether it's donations at the door or donations for these prints here, everything is going to go back to the Turtle Conservation Organization that Elliot's going to be talking about tonight. So it's our pleasure to be able to hopefully send Elliot home with a nice little nest egg to send off to our, oh hey, there we go, yeah. So a couple of other things I'll mention is that if you are a traveling type and are interested in going down and checking out some of these sorts of tropical locations and immersing yourself in some of the wilder destinations on our planet, whether it be sea turtles or monarch butterflies or birds or rhinos or whatever, we offer what we call Adventures of Fire. Seasonally we take, the nature center here takes folks all across the world looking at everything mother nature has to offer. Everywhere from looking at grizzly bears and the Yellowstone to endemic birds in Mexico, to South Africa, to elsewhere. So we have some cards in the back room back there about all of our upcoming adventures for 2020 and 2021. So if tonight inspires you to travel, then boy have I have an organization for you. Also, many of you who are here tonight, I recognize from our Naturalist Journeys presentation series, which we do every winter. We invite Naturalists to come and give talks in their research or their travels. And so that's gonna be starting up, I think our 15th or 16th annual season of Naturalist Journeys in January. And we have some, I'm unveiling right now for the first time our upcoming talks that we have coming. And you can also find these in our hot off the press seasonal newsletter, which is just outside, just outside the door here too. So make sure you take one of these home with you because this has our whole lots of nice bedtime reading, but also our whole season calendar coming up. So in the next couple of months, come back and join us right here on Friday nights for learning all about whales from Joe Roman, learning all about the birds at the refuge in between formerly East and West Germany along the former border, learning all about coyotes from Chris Shadler about hiking through the wildernesses of the Appalachian Trail, the New Zealand Te Arora and the Pacific Crest Trail from Tyler Sokash. Our local favorite Charlie Cogbel is gonna be talking about his research in pre-settlement forests of the Northeast. So what our forests look like 300, 400 years ago prior to European settlement here. And then finally, the moose of Yellowstone and Isle Royale by a local naturalist Kai Koich. So you have that to look forward to in terms of upcoming presentations. And the last thing I'll mention is that those of you that know us know that we like to band saw what owls this time of year. And we spend a lot of time, our naturalist and staff here out catching these cute little adorable soda can sized owls all throughout the fall. And if you heard a sound in the distance as you were coming up the stairs that sounded like a truck backing up in the woods. That's the territorial call of this owl. And after tonight's talk, you're welcome to join us over in the Swallows Nest, the barn next door to check out our research and hopefully see some of these owls. So after turtles, you can feel free to stay for owls later on. So I just want to invite you to join us over there after tonight's talk. So with that, I want to just make a quick mention that in many ways my start as a naturalist came on an experience that was very similar to what we're gonna hear about tonight. I went on a trip as a teenager to Costa Rica to participate in sea turtle conservation with North Ranch Nature Center. And it was one of the most life-changing experiences I've ever had to be able to be there with these turtles laying eggs in the dark under the stars. And in many ways, it was just very, very formative for me and kind of sparked my interest in conservation biology. And so when Elliot came to us and said, hey, I want to showcase this experience, this research, these photographs, it was a no-brainer. This is one of the most amazing things one can experience as a conservation-minded human being and one of the most powerful ways to engage with our natural world. And so it's a pleasure to be able to bring you here to tonight, Elliot, to tell us all about it. Thank you, thank you. Thank you. Boy, do I feel honored to be part of this series here. My background is as a public interest lawyer, as Amy and others know, but in 2010 I went down to the Pacific Coast of Mexico to do volunteer work, as Sean was talking about. And I worked at a place called Sidonito Macho. I'll explain what the words mean, but it's an encampment on the Pacific Coast and it's a sea turtle conservation project that's run by a Mexican couple. It's really the smallest scale you could imagine and yet incredibly inspirational. A husband, his name is Javier, and a wife, her name is Lucy, and they have been doing this work for the last 16 years. And it was an incredible honor to be down there. First as a volunteer, and that was in 2010, and then last fall, as a photographer, I brought my camera equipment down to photo-document the work they were doing because I wanted to bring it back here. One of the miracles of photography is you can see what I saw and that's what I'm gonna show you. So first of all, I guess let me introduce myself. I'm Elliot Berg, I'm a freelance photographer. I live in Middlesex, and most of the work I do is photography of people, but this was, and I usually don't do night photography, but this was a great stretch for me and a real learning experience. So one note about the smallest connection I had with turtles before I went down to Mexico, and it's sort of a sad child story, but I'll tell you anyway. I grew up in a household where my parents did not allow any animals in the house that had fur. And that's a really limiting factor for kids who wanted a cat or a dog. But we did send away for miniature turtles and we got them in a box and maybe half a dozen. Does anybody remember, this was a thing, I think back in the 50s, and they didn't last very long, but they were incredibly adorable like this one. And I think I had a sort of a special place in my heart for turtles, and when the opportunity came up in 2010 to do volunteer work on the Pacific Coast of Mexico, I took it. And last fall, I took it again to do photography. So let me tell you where this project is. On the southern coast of Mexico, there is the resort town of Acapulco, and 100 miles to the east of that is a market town called Marcalia, which is a little bit bigger than Montpelier. And if you were to take a bus on the coastal road heading east toward Oaxaca from Acapulco, you arrive in Marcalia, and it's a quiet town, just a market town, and on the far side of town, there is a small road that heads south toward the coast. And three miles on, it dead ends here. A very beautiful beach and the ocean. This is an area that's called Las Penitas, and that's a word that describes these beautiful rock outcroppings from the ocean. At Las Penitas, there is this encampment. It's called Senenito Macho. And if you approach it from the beach, there is an outdoor eating area under sort of palm fronds. It's not fancy, plastic tables and chairs. There's a kitchen. There are cabins that you can stay in with bathrooms, and there is an educational area outdoors. But most importantly, there is a fenced in area called a corral, and corral that's about 60 feet by 60 feet. And that's where Javier and Lucy move turtle eggs that with government permission, they dig up from the sand or catch from the turtles that are laying them and rebury them so they will be safe. And I'll explain what the dangers are to the eggs. And that's the place where the eggs hatch and the hatchlings come out of the sand and they gather them up and bring them down to the ocean. So that's the corral. That's like the key part of their settlement. So this is Javier Mayo Huerta and Javier grew up right in this area. He is El Serenito. Serenito means a little siren, like a little water deity. And when he was small, he recounts, he was in the ocean all the time. He was a really good swimmer. Couldn't stay out of the water. He was also really concerned as a child with how turtles were being treated there. When he was small, turtles would be captured and every part of the turtle would be used. I'll try to keep this non-graphic, but there are tortoiseshell combs and turtle soup and turtle eggs. And so the turtle eggs, and this is gonna figure heavily into the work that these people do, turtle eggs are considered to be an aphrodisiac in Mexico, like rhino horn. I'll let parents explain that to your children. But it's an unfortunate misperception that people have. And so those eggs have economic value. They can be sold on the market. When Javier was a kid, they were sold on the open market. Today they're sold on the black market. And so Javier was really concerned. This experience of seeing turtles treated in this way stuck with him. And he decided when he grew up that he was gonna do turtle conservation, was gonna create a program. And he married Lucy Carmona Liborio, his absolutely wonderful partner, strong woman, quiet, but sort of the center of the project. The turtles that their efforts are directed at are three in number. There are three species of turtles that live in the water off of Las Benitas. So there is the Olive Ridley Turtle, which is called La Golfina in Spanish. There is the East Pacific Green Turtle, which is called La Prieta. And there is the Giant Leatherback Turtle, which is called El Laud. So here's the life cycle of turtles that Javier and Lucy have had to orient their conservation efforts around. Let me ask, has anybody here like Sean been to Costa Rica or Mexico and seen sea turtles laying eggs? A number of you, okay. So you know that the females come out of the water at night when they're ready to lay. They dig a nest in the sand. They lay their eggs, they cover up the nest, and they return to the water. They never see their babies, which is not sad. It's just a fact of turtle life. A month and a half later, the eggs hatch. And the hatchlings, which are very small, make their way through the sand to the surface of the beach, and they orient themselves to the water. And they, on little feet, they make their way to the ocean and enter the water. The conservation project that they do at Sinanito Macho consists of two things. One is protecting the eggs and the babies. It's actually two different functions, but they protect the organisms that way, and they do education. And one of the things that happens is people come and visit, people come and stay there. So there are people from Mexico, there are naturalists who come, foreign tourists and student groups. And one of the things that Javier explains when he's doing his educational talk is that there are three gauntlets that the turtles have to make their way through in the course of their life cycle. It's a dangerous world for turtles. First of all, when the eggs are laid, in this part of Mexico anyway, there are human poachers, people who come and rob the eggs, and dogs who dig up the eggs. So the turtles lay them, the poachers come, they can read the beach, they see that eggs were laid earlier in the night, and they come and they take the eggs, and they sell them on the black market. Those eggs that make it to hatching, the babies come out of the sand, and then you've got birds and crabs that will descend on this little parade of baby turtles that are trying to make their way to the ocean. And then finally, when the babies get in the water, there are any number of predators that will consider them a meal. So Javier and Lucy are really interested in trying to maximize numbers. They're trying to protect the eggs, they're trying to protect the babies, and they are trying to educate people so that there is a sense of the importance of conservation in the community. As if that were not enough in terms of danger, and it's important to know these things. There is the issue of light pollution, so people build a hotel or cabanas or a restaurant on the beach, and the lights from that, if they're on at night, can throw the females off. They're trying to find a nesting site, and that makes it difficult for them to do that. There are places on the beach where there is trash. There's a lot of plastic in the ocean, you know that. And so there'll be sections of beach that are completely pristine. And there'll be other places where there'll be a ridge of plastic that's six feet wide and 100 feet long and maybe a foot deep. Fishing nets can snag turtles, and climate change is now having an impact on the gender of turtles. The Washington Post had an article a couple of weeks ago that explained that the gender of turtles that come out of the nest, or out of the eggs, is dependent in part on the temperature of the sand. So the hotter the sand, the more females you have. Okay, apparently it's an impact on genes or an impact on enzymes. Scientists are trying to figure it out. But once you hit 87, 88 degrees, you're talking about all girls. Which is, it's a difficult model to use for reproduction, needless to say. This is what I mean by trash on the beach. In some places, I don't want to give you the sense that if you arrived at Las Benitas, you'd look down and you'd see trash. But there are places along the beach that are like this. Javier does most of the night work now, although he has members of his family who help him or substitute for him. But most nights, he is out on the beach patrolling. He is looking for turtles that are laying eggs and he's looking for nests where the eggs have already been laid. The purpose of that is, as I mentioned before, to move the eggs to that protected corral. There is a stretch of about 11 miles that Javier has taken responsibility for. Now, this is a project that has permission from the government to move eggs, but has no government support financially, no foundation grants. They're just doing it with what they can raise from people who stay there or from contributions to Serenito Macho. Javier is uncannily able to read the beach, like a book. The first time I went out with him at night in 2010, all I could see were footprints and dips and mounds. I had no idea what I was looking at and he looked over there and said there was a green turtle here a couple of hours ago and I bet the nest is right over here. And he had a stick that he would use to probe for the airspace above the eggs. So the eggs are typically deposited in a hole that's about that deep. Each species has its own depth and its own shape, its own architecture of nest, but he knows who was there and when and it was really quite amazing to see him do this. Out of the gloom, out of the blackness of the ocean, if you're lucky, a female will arrive and make her way to the upper beach and sort of look around for a place that she thinks is appropriate to dig her nest, okay? I'm not sure exactly what it is that they're looking for because there are stretches of open sand that they'll go right across and they'll find some place that they really like and begin digging. They have incredibly powerful flippers and they'll dig that hole and here are some close-ups of an olive-ridley turtle. The markings are reptilian, but for me anyway there was no sense of ooh, a reptile or a snake or a lizard. They're just, they're so beautiful and they're so gentle and quiet and dedicated to what they're doing which is laying eggs and reproducing. A detail of the flipper. Now I didn't see any leatherback turtles last fall when I went down to do photography, but back in 2010 I did. And just to give you some idea of the scale of the animals we're talking about, the smaller turtles, the green turtles and the ridley turtles at the shell are about this big, okay? These are not wood turtles, they're not lake turtles. They're really good size and the leatherbacks, like this one, they are six feet long commonly on the shell. This doesn't include the head, okay? These turtles are called, the Spanish name is elauud and elauud is the term that's used to refer to a lute, the musical instrument because the markings, the ridges on the back of a leatherback are like the strings on a lute. So they're just awesome, awesome animals. Some turtles have barnacles on their shells. So here's a turtle looking for a nesting site, then she begins to dig the nest. Night photography is a real challenge and I was so proud of myself for having timed my trip last fall so that the full moon would fall exactly in the center of my time there. And it turned out that moonlight, although our eye picks it up and if you look at the moon it's pretty bright, it doesn't cast enough light to be able to take photographs, at least in that setting. It was really dark and I brought a tripod but as slow as turtles move, they still move. And so then you're talking with a long exposure, you're talking about the possibility of blur. So I explained the problem to Javier and he said, when turtles come up from the water if you shine, let's say you have a headlamp and a really small flashlight, if you shine a light from behind it doesn't disturb them and once they start laying their eggs you can be right there. And it's almost as if they're in a trance. Now he's been doing this for a really long time and it seemed to be the case that the turtles were not in any way disrupted or disturbed, they didn't stop doing what they were doing once they began laying eggs. So here's Kavi, you're behind the turtle. So the eggs are gonna be laid in that dark area between her flippers. I call this in labor, is it appropriate to refer to laying eggs as being in labor? It was like that, it seemed, concentrating. It's not uncommon to see this, what looks like a tear coming down from the turtle's eye. This turtle is not crying. She has a gland that will secrete a liquid that will clear some of the excess salt from her eye from the ocean. But when I was putting this presentation together I looked at the slide again and I thought I have read somewhere about a sobbing turtle. Does anybody know the reference? A melancholy turtle? The mock turtle in Alice in Wonderland, right? The mock turtle who was so sad apparently because he wasn't a real turtle. He was a mock turtle, like mock turtle soup. It's all punning. But I wondered whether Lewis Carroll knew something about the natural life of turtles and had in mind that turtles will secrete this tear-like substance. These turtles lay a lot of eggs. The smaller ones, the greens and the riddlies, will typically lay between 80 and 120 eggs. It seems almost impossible that they can fit those eggs in their body. The eggs are about the size of a ping-pong ball, maybe a little bit smaller. And they are not hard like a chicken egg. They sometimes refer to them as leathery, but I don't think that does them justice. They're an off-white, creamy color and they're soft enough so that when they plop into the nest, remember the nests are pretty deep, they don't break. But you also want to be careful with them because they are delicate. And the leatherbacks lay between 70 and 80 eggs, typically. Those are bigger eggs. The eggs are coming out of this soft chute that's called a cloaca and they typically drop one at a time or two at a time. So it takes a long time. The turtle can be, from the time she leaves the ocean to the time she goes back to the ocean, it can be an hour, an hour and a half, two hours, okay, this is a very long, deliberate process. Reaching in to get the eggs, so remember the point of this is to take these eggs that otherwise might be robbed by a poacher and get them to the protected enclosure. Javier is in a race for life here, in a way, against the poachers. And the poachers, they're local people, they're on the beach, not a lot of them, but enough, they can read the beach. So he needs to get to the eggs first. So he takes them out while the turtle is rocking them in, while the other one that turtle is putting in. It depends on where in the process the mother is. So if all the eggs have been laid, but the mother has not yet filled in the nest, so the eggs might be removed altogether. If, obviously, if the turtle has already laid the eggs and covered over the nest, then you dig down and you get them. But there is this sort of magical scenario that I wanna describe to you, which is coming across a sea turtle that is laying eggs, and it's early enough in the process that you can see the eggs dropping, and Javier would lie on the sand and catch the eggs as they dropped, and put them in this plastic bag to go in a backpack to go back to the corral. And on several occasions, he asked me to do that. And I was just, you know, really? He wanted me to lie next to the turtle and catch, he said, yes, I want you to do that. Just be very careful and put them into this pile in a plastic bag. And so I lay, this probably happened four or five times, but just a peak experience in my life. Lying next to this turtle, but like right next to the turtle, so that my shoulder is near her rear flipper on her left side, and I'm reaching in and catching the eggs. And every time an egg or a pair of eggs would drop from the cloaca, there would be, I would call it in human terms, a contraction, okay? The flippers would go like this. And that left flipper would brush against my shoulder or my arm. And I just have to say, I mean, it's a wild animal that in an hour or two is gonna be in the deep ocean. Who knows what she's going to see out there that we will never see. And yet for that instant she was on land and there was this moment of touch. I don't wanna dramatize it, but I am. But it was amazing. So pulling the eggs out of the nest. A lot of the photography that I do, I consider to be artistic. That's what I try to make it. So there was something about the eggs that was really artistic. They were so beautiful in hand against the black of the night in the light of Kavier's red headlamp, eggs as art. Then there's the process of filling in the nest with these powerful flippers. And at a certain point in that process, the flippers start sending the sand, streaming out from the back of the turtle. So you have to like stay out of the way because they are, it's like, it's raining horizontally, raining sand. Then the turtle has, turtles have this sort of bottom shell. I think it's called a plastron. They will rock back and forth and tamp down the top of the nest. And then they will sweep the area so that it's harder for predators to see that there's a nest. So here's the valuable cargo at the end of the process. And then the mother goes back to the ocean. There was something mystical about that to me. She was here and then she's gonna be really gone somewhere, who knows where, out in the ocean, back into the water, going home. Okay, so the other scenario is where the turtle has already been there. Kavier reads the beach. He realizes that there's a nest here, that's a recent nest, and he will find it, probe for the airspace, dig down to get to the eggs. Couple of nights in November, Kavier had business out of town, so their daughter, Abril, who lives in Markelia, you know, everybody in the family knows how to do this stuff. Okay, I mean, they've grown up on this. So she drove the, did I say that he's on a four-wheeler? So she drove the four-wheeler and I was on the back holding my camera equipment. Which is a whole other experience, by the way, because this is not like a domesticated beach. This is a place where when the tides come in, there's very little space between the water and the sand cliffs that are created by the action of the waves. So in order to keep the four-wheeler from stalling out in the water, you have to gun it through this. It's like the Red Sea parts. You go through and you have to get to the other side of this area that can be, you know, 20, 30 yards before the water comes in again. So, and sometimes you go up on the cliffs. It was crazy. Javier and Lucy have a couple of friends, about six or seven miles down the beach, named Julio and Bikki. These folks live in a shack, lovingly built shack, but they're really living close to the margin. And yet they were so, and this is really common in so many countries, they were so welcoming and so generous. So sometimes Javier and I would go out and at two in the morning, Julio would be there, again, seven, eight miles down the beach, with hot coffee and we would sit around the fire and Javier would wait until a time of night when he thought more turtles might be coming on the beach. The other thing that Javier could read is the absence of eggs, which I thought was interesting. This doesn't really mean anything to me, but to him this means that there was a poacher there and he can tell like how long ago it was and not to dig there. So the eggs get transported back to Serenito Macho to that corral that he has, and this is a big enough place for about 100 substitute nest sites, each area about that big. And so he will get back, he's got a post hole digger and he'll dig down to create a new nest for this particular bag of olive ridley eggs, for example, he's got a half coconut shell that he used to shape the nest, so it's the right size and the right depth. And then he'll do something called the term he uses is sembrando, which means seeding, like with seeds, seeding the nest, very carefully louvering them into the nest. These are ready to be covered and then he tamps down the nest. He's sort of doing the same thing that the mother would do except he doesn't use his belly. And then he will mark the nest with information on the number of eggs and the species and who collected them and the date and so on. So 45 days later, so you have this corral and at any one time there might be 30 or 40 nests that exist there at different points in the incubation process. But 45 days is about the time when the babies start coming up and what they need to do is they need to basically swim up through the sand to the surface of the beach. And usually there's like one pioneer that will make it to the top first. And each one that comes out, they are hardwired to go to the ocean. That's what they wanna do and they will climb over their brothers and sisters, not hurting them, but trying to get to the sand so they can get back, get not back, but get to the ocean to begin the next stage of their life. So these are, you know, again, beyond adorable. They're about that big, so three, four inches. Yes, absolutely. And to prevent, you know, the early risers from getting out first and they can't get through the chain-link fence. The holes are too small, but they don't want these hatchlings all over the corral. So what they do is they put chicken wire around the top of the nest so it'll sort of gather the siblings together, the brothers and sisters. And then they place them in a basin and make a notation as to how many there are, and again the species and so on, have a very high incubation rate, is my understanding. Okay, so that most of the eggs will hatch and produce hatchlings. So this must be disorienting for them, because. It's not the situation that they would be in if they were in the wild. On the other hand, there are no gulls and there are no crabs that are gonna pick them off. So, and it seems to work because let me just take you to the next step. Here's Lucy with a basin full of hatchlings. She's walking down toward the water. They don't put the hatchlings in the water, they want them to orient themselves to the ocean. So they put them probably 20 feet back from the water and stand there so that no other animal, no predator is gonna get to them. And this process has a name too, a special name, it's la liberación, liberating the hatchlings. I love these ways of describing what they're doing. Okay, so I think I mentioned that Javier and Lucy have a granddaughter named Kati, she's the girl in the middle and this was taken in 2010. And this liberation process is really popular with the local kids. And this is something that Javier and Lucy encourage because they want the community to have a buy-in. They want children, who knows, it might be children of poachers, to care about the turtles. So whenever there's a liberación that's gonna happen, they get word out in Maricalia that this is gonna happen this afternoon, come on over. And in 2010 they had something called a turtle race and let me just be quick to explain that they're not doing anything fancy with the turtles. They're putting them on the beach the way they normally do but they put a string up with the kids behind and the kids could sort of mentally say, that's the turtle, that's my turtle and I hope that he or she gets to the ocean first. This other kid is rooting on for this turtle. So they have this little game for the kids. And then you watch these turtles and sometimes they're pretty good about finding the ocean but sometimes you see one that wanders off in the wrong direction and unless he or she goes into a danger zone, you just let them find the water. You know, this photograph I took on my belly, my camera on the sand and when I took it, I realized how big the ocean looked to the baby. It looked really big to me. And the other thing is that this is like the process that the mother goes through, right? It's like heading back into the mystery of the ocean. Sometimes the waves will sweep a baby back up the beach and the baby will just reorient and start heading for the water again. So this is part of the educational campaign. They have these posters and I think it's a great idea and what it says at the top is turtles don't need a superhero to save them and at the bottom it says they only need true men, should be true men and women but it's men that are the problem here, you know. Turtle eggs are not aphrodisiacs. So they wanna get that message out. When I came back and I asked Sean if I could do this presentation, I realized that I didn't have a good idea about the effectiveness of this program. Like how many turtles are there in the ocean now that wouldn't have been there if it hadn't been for the efforts of Sinaito Macho. And I went to visit Steve Perrin who is the state turtle guy. Sean, I'm sure you know him. He was very welcoming. I walked into his office and he had a file cabinet here and one drawer was marked turtles and the next drawer was marked snakes. I thought this was just really great. I never had a file cabinet like that when I worked in the Attorney General's office. Anyway, he confirmed my notion that it's very difficult to crunch the numbers. But I had some information from Javier and I had my own experience on this. And I mean, I left with some information this latest visit. And so this is what I put together and this is just incredible. This is order of magnitude kind of exactness, all right? But I think that it's worth looking at. I do know based on Javier and Lucy's records that they collect about 60,000 eggs a year. We do know that many of those eggs wouldn't hatch but for the efforts of Javier and Lucy and Abril and the other members of their family. Okay, the poachers would get them, the dogs would get them. So what's the number? Like how many of the eggs would not survive? And I put in an assumption of 50%. Based on the notion, this would never hold up in court, Amy, I understand this. Okay, but based on the notion that there are more poachers than people at Sidonito Macho, everybody is sort of skilled in a similar way to find the eggs, but Javier is out there and so incredibly persistent and he's covering a lot of territory. So I said, so maybe it's like 50-50, all right? Just bear with me on that assumption. And then the other choke point is when the hatchlings are heading to the ocean and how many of them would get picked off by predators. Again, we don't have that information, but I put in an assumption of 50% that half the hatchlings would make it into the water, the other half would get picked off by other animals. Maybe it's 20%, maybe it's 80%, I don't know. But if you use those numbers, there is one number that's available from scientific research, although it's a range and that is from egg to sexual maturity, you know, an adult in the ocean, there is about a 1% survival rate. Some research says less than that, it can be a tenth of a percent, some research says 2%. I picked a percent. So this is what the numbers come out to. If you follow these assumptions, that without conservation, you'd have 60,000 eggs, the ones that Sidani Tomacho would have collected, times 50%, times 50%, times 1%, it's 150 sexually matured turtles in the ocean. And with conservation, the 250% drop out and you end up with 600 sexually matured turtles, the difference being 450 a year. Now, maybe it's 100, maybe it's 1,000. But again, order of magnitude, that's what I was striving for. And Sidani Tomacho has been doing this work for 16 years. So using those assumptions, you'd be talking about over 7,000 turtles in the ocean. Again, maybe it's 3,000, maybe it's 12,000. But it's a fair number. And from a common sense standpoint, it makes, it does make sense because they are saving these eggs, the poachers can't get them, they are saving these hatchlings, the predators can't get them, they're doing what they're intending to do. And so it appears to be making a difference. So the important thing is that there are people in the world and people there who care about these animals. And I just wanted to point out that Cati, remember the granddaughter who is in the picture, they are with another couple of kids back in 2010, she's in the white dress now. This is last fall at her church confirmation. And like every member of her family, she knows everything there is to know about turtles. So one postscript on this that I thought was serendipitous. And the jury is not, in on this. But the second to last day I was there, Javier came to me. There were two scientists who had arrived at Serenity Domacho from Mexico City, two women, and they were interested in the project. And Javier said, the three of us are gonna go into town tomorrow to speak to the town council. And I'd like you to come. And I said, sure, sure. So we piled into his Jeep, the one that doesn't have a windshield. And we headed up that small road to Marcalia. And there in a function hall were about 100 people. And it was a stage with the town council there, a Mexican flag and land and Liberty, Tierra y Libertad there, the logo. And Javier went up on stage and he was doing some presentation. Scientists were there. And I was taking photographs. And I wasn't listening to what anybody was saying. And suddenly I heard my name and Javier motioned to me and said, I'd like you to come up on stage and I want you to tell everybody here what your experience has been in Marcalia at Las Panyitas, at Serenity Domacho. I want you to tell them why you're here and what you learned. So I gathered my thoughts very quickly and I explained that I had done volunteer work before and I'd come back to document this and that I was really humbled to be welcomed to this place and to be able to do the tiniest bit of work and to bring word of what they're doing back to my country. And I also said, I thought this was an opportunity, I also said, I think that turtles are an economic resource for this community. I mean, I'm here because there were turtles laying eggs on the beach. People come to Serenity Domacho and stay there because of that. The more turtles you have, the more people who come. And that doesn't mean you can't have unrestricted development, but if it's done carefully, this is really an opportunity. It's an opportunity to redirect the work that, sorry, the work that the poachers are doing to support their families into something that would protect the turtles. Everybody can have a stake in this. And then I sat down. It had nothing to do with me. I'm sure of this, but that day, the town council voted to adopt a protocol to enforce existing law to protect the turtles, to take steps locally to prevent or discourage poachers from digging up eggs. Now, I don't know how this has turned out. I don't know how this impacts the numbers, but Javier had been knocking on this door for years and years, and this was a breakthrough. And the fact that people were talking about it, that people were talking about taking action was really inspiring. So the question is, what can we do all these thousands of miles away to help? And there's absolutely no pressure or expectation here, but, and I know that there was a donation jar outside, but anybody who would be interested in kicking in another, a first or another $10 into the basket can get a photograph. It's one of the photographs from this show, and take it home and put it in your kid's room. And August and I will match those amounts, okay? Mentioned that before. So if we raise $100, it'd be $200 that would go down to Sidonito Macho. And when I came back in 2010, I sent a couple of $100 to Javier and Lucy as a thank you, and they went out and they bought a copier, which they needed and didn't have access to otherwise. So, to the extent that from a distance, we can indicate our support for these kinds of efforts, it was so inspiring, because it's just a family. It's one couple and their adult children and their young granddaughter. And if they can do it, then this can happen all over. So, anyway, thank you so much for coming tonight. I don't know if anybody has any questions, I'd be happy to make a stab. So what happens when the baby turns into an ocean? How long does it take them to have any idea if there's maturity or where? I think it's 10, somebody else may have a better idea. Yeah, oh, I'm sorry. What's the time period from being a hatchling to sexual maturity? I think some turtles live a period of decades, 30, 40 years. Does that sound about right for sea turtles? I think leather bags can live longer, 50 years. But that doesn't mean that that's the point at which they hit sexual maturity. It's undoubtedly, you know. How long does it take them to grow to their full size? 10 years, 20 years, I'm out of my element. I'm deep in the water on this one. Okay, the other question may be out of your element too, but does anyone know if they come back to the same beach when they grow? That is what scientists say, that the turtle that nested at Las Venetas once will come back. Leather bags typically come back, my understanding is, every three years, the smaller turtles come back more often, might be every year or every two years. This is assuming that there aren't impediments, that they're not driven away by lights, and that they can find a nesting place. So my understanding is the answer is yes. Amy. What's the cover of the eggs? You said it's not a shell, but it must have some protection from the sand, which... Yeah, I mean, it's not permeable. The sand doesn't get into the inside. It's just that it's hard to describe the consistency. It's pliable. The word plop is the one that came to mind, because you can almost hear them dropping onto other eggs, and they will, it will change the shape, so you know the bottom will kind of come up. So not like it's chicken eggs. It moves to it, or at least it looks like it. Yeah, because it's... So it's moist. It is definitely moist, because it's coming through this canal, through this cloaca. Yes. Pam. When the eggs are being kindly collected, as she felt reposting them, does the mother turtle still try to fill in the nest and take it down when... The answer is yes, it's interesting. I think this is part of the trance that the females go into. So you saw, you know, it's a turtle laying eggs, we're pulling the eggs out. The turtles don't look around and say, where are my eggs? They don't leave without filling in the nest. They go through the entire process, as if the eggs were there. So it's like the process is hardwired. Once they go into this series of motions and behaviors, they finish them. Yeah. I have two questions. One is, so in the whole Machilia, this is the only family who do trinal conservation. In that place, yes. With the help, as I said, of this other couple, Julio and Vicky. Now, whether there are other family-oriented conservation projects on the coast of Mexico, I don't know. There are clearly conservation projects. They're in Costa Rica and Chile and California and lots of places. But not that there's any way I would know this, but I don't know of any other family-oriented projects like this. And what does that only do to earn a living in order to provide all these educational... They host people like us. Student groups, foreign tourists, scientists, they have this series of cabins, which are basic, but they're comfortable. And people stay there and they eat their meals, Lucy cooks and she has a decent-sized kitchen. And so people will come there for two or three days, go out on the beach two or three nights with Javier. And it's a really big experience. When the student groups come in, it can be 30 or 40 students at a time. And I believe that the schools will pay for that experience for the kids. And interestingly, some of those kids come, this is what I was told by Javier and Lucy, some of those kids come from highly-placed families in Mexico City. So it's like a private school there. So these are the kids that go back to say to their mom who's the minister of the environment, this is what you need to do. That's the kind of upward pressure that you want. Yeah, Michael. Is this a year-round biological phenomenon? There are seasons when the turtle-nesting populations are higher, but it's not like it's a, that they immediately drop off. So I think there are certain months of the year when Javier is not out as often. But it's, I think he's out there most of the year. So, and it's, and I know that he's out there during the nesting season seven nights a week. So it's from 10 or 11 at night, I don't know if I said this, from 10 or 11 at night to four in the morning. So the first time I did this with him, I got off the plane, got off the bus, arrived there and he said, we're going out on the beach tonight. What time? 10 o'clock. Okay. So I went out there and I was out there for six hours and I came back and I was completely jazzed. There was no way I was gonna fall asleep and the next thing I knew, everybody's having breakfast. You know, this is a killer schedule but he's completely wedded to it. So I think there were some times in a year when the nesting populations are much lower and those are not the times that you would go to see the turtles. How, do you know how much are getting for the eggs? I don't. I don't. And I actually asked, on this trip I asked Javier if he could take me to a place where they were selling eggs and he didn't wanna do that. He just, you know, it's a difficult balance. They're, again, they're local people. So, and we would be traveling down the beach on his four-wheeler and some guy would be walking in the other direction with one of these pointed sticks and I'd say, Guinness, who's that? And Kaffir would say, it's a poacher. So he knows, and he knows who they are. So he just felt like that was a step too far. I actually wanted to take photographs of that but it would never have happened. Yeah, Mary. How tricky was it to recreate a nest? Like, in terms of depth and shape, and did that have any bearing on whether we got hatchlings if we got it wrong? Well, he said that well in excess, I mean they keep track of this. So he knows how many eggs have been deposited there in the corral, in each nest, because it's marked. And they know how many hatchlings come out so they can keep track of it. My understanding is that well in excess of 90% of the eggs hatch. So I think he's doing it successfully but he was very careful about this and depending upon the species of turtle whose eggs they were, he would be working in a different way. And the nests, so they're, I mean it would be like a cylinder that would come down and then there'd be this chamber in the bottom. How the turtles are able to do that, I'm not sure. It seems like a difficult thing to do with a flipper but they do. So yeah, I think he's able to do it. Emily, did you have a question? Well, I'm just gonna add some thoughts to what was already presented. So there's comfort in knowing that this project was happening in Mexico because like you said, it's also happening in other parts. Having done it in Costa Rica, it was a very similar thing with a family run in that way and we were staying with a host family. So the town we were in or I was in, I was part of a hospital but then also there were host families and there were kids coming in from all over the world. We were there for three weeks, a month, six months doing the work of the turtles. So it was really, so there's comfort in knowing like I was saying that this is happening and then in different areas this work is happening, good work is happening to help protect the turtle populations and it's local families, it's local organizations that are working to protect them. Thank you, that's good to hear. And they also are, it's very similar in the fact that we went out at night doing night patrols and at least in Costa Rica the season was mostly from October to May with the, or February with the most population in the world. So remember that there are photos here and I have business cards here so if anybody wants to get the contact information for Sidani Domacho you can do that but they have a Facebook page so all you need to type in on Facebook is Sidani Domacho, siren, ito, macho, separate word and you'll get to there and they have photographs that they take all the time of what's going on. Thank you for having all the right words when you turn up on the stage. Oh, well I hope I had all the right words. No, I haven't said the words. Yes. Worth money. Yeah, that was the right words. Yeah. Did you just manage it? Yes. Good question, what happens to the eggs in shells? Do they just decompose it in the way? They can not do anything. I don't know whether you know, Emily, I don't know, do the hatchlings eat the outside? No, well, it is very elastic as you described. Yeah. The flexibleness of the shell, it really isn't a shell like you were describing, it's just very viable. It just kind of shriveled up and I know that we would take it from the hatchery and she just would deposit it on the other side of the hatchery. Yeah. So I don't think we ever saw them. We would see, in the corral, we would see the hatchlings coming out and no sign of the actual egg membrane. So, pretty special project. It was amazing. Thank you. Thanks.