The results are in

In ten days on Playa Colorado for the ISA World Masters Surfing Championship, we hauled out 21000 pounds of garbage and 3000 pounds of recycables.

Thanks again to partner organizations RENISA and Proyecto TESÓN who helped us keep the beaches clean.

From El Salvador: Hawksbills in the News

Sadly, today's batch of links includes news of the deaths of two critically endangered Hawksbills, both of whom were tagged by ICAPO earlier this summer.

This video from Media Center ElSalvador.com (in Spanish) features interviews with ICAPO staff, as well as mangrove conservationists, and provides a thorough overview of the significance of the lessons learned from these particular turtles, one of whom died as a result of fishing with explosives, the other after getting stuck in a fishing net.

This video from ContraPuntoTV (also in Spanish) features a community festival celebrating the Hawksbills who were tagged for science, illustrating the increasing awareness of the importance of local Hawksbill turtle populations for conservation science. It also shows just how the satellite transmitters are affixed to the turtle shells.

Before the fishing accidents, this July 22nd piece at ElSalvador.com (again in Spanish) brought attention to the importance of protecting critically endangered Hawksbills and their mangrove habitat.

There is much to be learned from ICAPO's studies of the Eastern Pacific Hawksbill, and the unfortunate loss of these Hawksbills reminds us of the importance of protecting our mangroves, and continuing our work establishing sustainable fisheries in Nicaragua.

Aloha!

On July 14th the International Surfing Association World Masters Surfing Championship opened on Playa Colorado, Nicaragua, bringing the world's best surfers, surfing fans, and international media to the region where we work.

Surfwire described Playa Colorado as "a place where the jungle met the sand and the Howler Monkeys offered early-morning wake-up calls" giving the international visitors "a first-hand opportunity to see and be a part of a surf culture on the rise."

Gold Medal Team Hawaii knows a thing or two about surf culture, having invented the sport and shared it with the world. "I'm really stoked for the Hawaiian team," said women's gold medalist Rochelle Ballard. "This whole event has been about that, sharing our Aloha and our passion...I love that spirit of sharing; it's really inspiring."

Hawaii deserves congratulations for their medals and for their work in protecting the Hawaiian subpopulation of the green sea turtle or honu, whose IUCN Red List status was updated this month to species of least concern.

The IUCN's (International Union for Conservation of Nature) new honu status is the result of decades of research and conservation in Hawaii that "allowed the population to recover, and gives hope to the recovery of depleted marine turtle populations in other parts of the world."

To everyone in the international surfing community, and especially to our friends in Hawaii, felicidades, congratulations, gracias, thank you, and mahalo!

Welcome to Playa Colorado!

This is our home all week for the International Surf Association's World Masters Surfing Championship.

Here, in part, thanks to the SIMA Environmental Fund, which supports our Surf Ambassadors program for ocean conservation, we're helping with event logistics and making sure the environmental impact is minimal. Working with our RENISA and our Proyecto TESON partners at Comunidad Connect and Cafe Las Flores, we're patrolling the beach all day for litter. Playa Colorado is an important nesting beach and it's turtle nesting season, so two of our star rangers are here to patrol the beach at night for turtles.

Working in the surfing community for a few years to help ensure the local surfing community upholds the international tradition of combining a love of the waves with a commitment to clean oceans, we're excited about what this event means for coastal Nicaragua.

As reported at ESPN, "surfing, like any sport, can be a powerful mechanism for change. The people of Nicaragua are hoping this is the case."

We're pleased to join ISA in working "for the conservation and improvement of coastal environments and the protecting of surfing resources worldwide."

The Underwater Enviropreneur

For the winter/spring edition of PERC Reports, Reed Watson talked to scuba diver and reef restoration entrepreneur, Brett Howell.  As the Walker Conservation Fellow at the Georgia Aquarium, Howell hopes to illustrate that Florida's coral reefs, a hotbed of biodiversity, present opportunity for cooperation and restoration, rather than a source of conflict.

Howell works with the Coral Restoration Foundation (CRF), which grows endangered species of coral in nurseries, to identify parties who benefit from (and are willing to pay for) healthy reefs. Given that reef-related eco-tourism generates $4 billion annually, Howell is well positioned to link the sellers of coral restoration (like the CRF) with potential buyers, such as the dive shops and fishing captains whose businesses depend on healthy reef ecosystems.

With our own commitment to conflict resolution and reef restoration, we are eager to watch Howell's experiment unfold.

One Turtle Saved

Fifteen years ago the hawksbill sea turtle in my hands would have been hog-tied, whisked hundreds of miles, slaughtered and carved into trinkets. 

Now, it swims free. 

On Baja’s Pacific coast, an adult male hawksbill sea turtle found its way into a fisherman’s net. In the past, for the fisherman anyway, such a thing would have been considered a stroke of good luck. The endless demand for turtle meat, eggs, skin and shell on the black market can provide a nice payday to anyone willing to endure the low-level risk of being caught. 

Hawksbill turtles, once common, are now the rarest of the rare due to decades of being hunted for their beautiful shells, which get carved into combs, broaches, and other adornments. 

These days, however, a Mexican grassroots conservation movement called GrupoTortuguero.org has challenged the old ways and shaken things up a bit. A network of thousands of fishermen, women and children count themselves among its ranks.

Among the fishermen working to save turtles, is Julio Solis, featured in this short film.


Julio Solis, A MoveShake Story from RED REEL on Vimeo.

Wallace J. Nichols, Brad Nahill, and the team at SEE Turtles and SEEtheWILD chronicle efforts to save endangered sea turtles in the inaugural issue of WildHope, their new online magazine.

Burt Talks to the Bees

Via the Sustainable Brands newsletter:

Burt’s Bees is collaborating with artists and experts at the Pollinator Partnership to generate greater public awareness about the importance of honeybees to agriculture and the threats they face.  

For such small, short-lived creatures, bees do a lot of heavy lifting to keep life on Earth in balance. In fact, an estimated one-third of the food on Earth depends on pollination by bees. Because they are instrumental to biodiversity, they are what scientists call indicator species, functioning as an alarm system for the health of ecosystems.  

... 

Nearly every scientist agrees that all bees need nesting habitats and a variety of healthy flower food to thrive - and they’re in short supply. Humans have used up all the land - we've planted crops from field edge-to-edge, lawns from yard to yard (no bee food there), and fancy ornamental plants where once scruffy natives used to stand. In most agricultural settings today, bees find only one kind of food for days and weeks on end, which is unhealthy (and perhaps boring) for the insects.  

...  

This June for National Pollinator Week, Burt’s Bees will premiere "Burt Talks to the Bees", a series of three short films created by Isabella Rossellini, actor, director and Burt impersonator. The films introduce the bees - the queen, the workers and the drones - in an effort to make viewers more sympathetic to their plight. 

The first in the video series introduces us to worker bees and how honey is made. The Sustainable Brands piece outlines many of the reasons we are active in advancing the scientific understanding of pollinators and reviving the tradition of meliponiculture.