Meet Ostional's first turtle hatchlings in 25 years!

For more than two decades, poachers raided every single sea turtle nest on the beach in Ostional, a small fishing village along the Nicaragua's southern Pacific coast.

Determined to change that, we came up with a system of incentive payments to reward individuals for finding, reporting, and protecting turtle nests, and additional incentive payments to reward the community at large for supporting our conservation efforts.

How's that commitment to voluntary solutions working out for us?

Meet the first baby sea turtles to hatch on the beach in Ostional in 25 years!

Update: Turtle Tracker

"Our" turtle Brasilia has made it to El Salvador. You can monitor her progress here.


Our turtle rangers have also encountered a third Hawksbill turtle, which will receive the transmitter which was stolen from Karen.

Partnering with the Private Wildlife Reserve Network

Paso Pacifico and the Red de Reservas Silvestres Privadas have officially joined forces to help to guide our partnership and strengthen Paso Pacifico’s commitment to supporting the Private Reserve Network.

We are very fortunate to be partnering with such a valuable organization and its members.

Please check out the website for the Red de Reservas Silvestres Privadas when you have a chance. You will be amazed at how the membership has grown!

September 19th: Nicaragua’s 2nd International Coastal Clean-up

September 4th Paso Pacifico will be holding a national press conference with MARENA and its many other partners about the International Coastal Clean-up. We expect it to be a major press event. Stay tuned for more coverage. The clean up is scheduled for September 19th.

We have also received a grant to support the clean-up event. A portion of the fund will be used to purchase garbage canisters to be awarded to municipalities across the country with the best clean-up effort.

Plastics in oceans decompose, release hazardous chemicals

Our coastal, harbor, and waterways cleanups are even more important than we thought:

WASHINGTON, Aug. 16, 2009 — In the first study to look at what happens over the years to the billions of pounds of plastic waste floating in the world’s oceans, scientists are reporting that plastics — reputed to be virtually indestructible — decompose with surprising speed and release potentially toxic substances into the water.

Reporting here today at the 238^th National Meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS), the researchers termed the discovery “surprising.” Scientists always believed that plastics in the oceans were unsightly, but a hazard mainly to marine animals that eat or become ensnared in plastic objects. 

“Plastics in daily use are generally assumed to be quite stable,” said study lead researcher Katsuhiko Saido, Ph.D. “We found that plastic in the ocean actually decomposes as it is exposed to the rain and sun and other environmental conditions, giving rise to yet another source of global contamination that will continue into the future.”

Read the full article here.

Portable Light Project: Designs to Improve Life

We are thrilled that our partners at the Portable Light Project are INDEX Award finalists. The INDEX Award is one of the most significant awards for designs that improve life.

We've just put our new solar FLAP bags from the Portable Light Project to work in the field.

Sloan Kuyper from the Portable Light Project
teaches turtle rangers about his team's product.

Turtle Rangers at La Flor
show off their new solar FLAP bags.

These solar FLAP bags each have a red light adapter for night time monitoring of important turtle nesting beaches. The red light units, custom designed to replace white light for our turtle rangers, allow us to patrol the beaches at night without disorienting the turtle hatchlings who rely on moonlight to guide them to sea.

These adaptable solar textile kits enable people with no access to electricity to use traditional weaving and sewing techniques to create clothing, blankets, and bags that harvest energy from sunlight. Weighing only 340 grams, a 4-watt solar textile can easily be carried and charges in 3 hours, corresponding to 8 hours of light.

...
In Nicaragua, Portable Light in a locally made pack enables villagers to have light for community education and work at night as conservationists protecting turtle nests. In South Africa, tuberculosis/HIV patients can use Portable Light in a blanket to generate power for their families as they are cured by exposure to sunlight. The ability to charge cell phones with Portable Light enables people to benefit from connectivity to mobile technology that is transforming health care, business, and education in the developing world. Renewable light extends useful time at night, creating unprecedented opportunities to study and work to improve household incomes. Family health is improved by reducing the need to burn fuels for light, reducing deforestation, and kin can link solar textiles in a clean energy network for community projects.”

This new application of technology is helping us create local jobs in conservation, enabling Nicaraguans to put their expertise to use for the betterment of global biodiversity.

Please cast your vote to help the Portable Light Project win the People's Choice Award.

Using Fractals to Mitigate Climate Change

NOVA: Hunting the Hidden Dimension

Paso Pacifico founder, ecologist Sarah Otterstrom,
ponders our carbon sequestration projects. 

Bill Enquist, a plant ecologist at the University of Arizona, is using fractals to further understanding of forests and how they remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to help regulating the Earth's climate. Enquist and his team of scientists are working in forest reserves in the Guanacaste Province in Costa Rica, which borders the area where we work in Rivas, Nicaragua. Their explorations of trees and forests is fascinating, and has a lot of implications for our Return to Forest project to mitigate climate change a few miles north.

BRIAN ENQUIST: If you look at the xforest, it, basically, breathes. And if we understand the total amount of carbon dioxide that's coming into these trees within this forest, we can then better understand how this forest then, ultimately, regulates the total amount of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere.
...
CHRISTINA LAMANNA (Santa Fe Institute): So, if we know the amount of carbon dioxide that one leaf is able to take in, then, hopefully, using the fractal branching rule, we can know how much carbon dioxide the entire tree is taking in
...
BRIAN ENQUIST: We're going to census this forest. We're going to be measuring the diameter at the base of the trees, ranging all the way from the largest trees down to the smallest trees. And in that way we can then sample the distribution of sizes within the forest.
...
NARRATOR: Even though the forest may appear random and chaotic, the team believes it actually has a structure, one that, amazingly, is almost identical to the fractal structure of the tree they have just cut down.

JAMES BROWN: The beautiful thing is that the distribution of the sizes of individual trees in the forest appears to exactly match the distribution of the sizes of individual branches within a single tree.
...
BRIAN ENQUIST: By analyzing the fractal patterns within the forest, that then enables us to do something that we haven't really been able to do before: have, then, a mathematical basis to then predict how the forest as a whole takes in carbon dioxide. And ultimately, that's important for understanding what may happen with global climate change.
...
NARRATOR: For generations, scientists believed that the wildness of nature could not be defined by mathematics. But fractal geometry is leading to a whole new understanding, revealing an underlying order governed by simple mathematical rules.

GEOFFREY WEST: What I thought of in my hikes through forests, that, you know, it's just a bunch of trees of different sizes, big ones here, small ones there, looking like it's sort of some arbitrary chaotic mess, actually has an extraordinary structure.

NARRATOR:  A structure that can be mapped out and measured using fractal geometry.

BRIAN ENQUIST:  What's absolutely amazing is that you can translate what you see in the natural world in the language of mathematics. And I can't think of anything more beautiful than that.

Read the full transcript or order the DVD on the NOVA website at PBS.org.

Caribbean Biological Corridor in the Works?

"The Plan establishes the profiles for projects to be developed in a 1,600 kilometer-long geographic area which links three countries’ landscapes, ecosystems, habitats and cultures, the local Environment Ministry (Semarena) announced today."

Reported in Dominican Today

We'll be watching!

Solar FLAP Bags for Turtle Rangers

We're getting excited to welcome our friends from the Portable Light Project to Nicaragua. They're bringing customized solar FLAP units for use on the turtle nesting beaches.

These special units, created just for us, will be mounted to these bags (pictured at right). Each unit will emit a red light, rather than a white light, to ensure that they don't disorient turtle hatchlings who follow the moonlight to sea.

We're grateful to Sheila Kennedy, whom we met at Pop!Tech last year, for her work designing these, and her team for their help orchestrating this project.