Twenty-eight Years of Buggy Adventures on a Mexican Turtle Beach
Madison McLoughlin, Katherine Comer Santos
The Science Exchange Seat Turtle Internship Program, San Diego, CA, United States and Puerto Vallarta, Jalisco, Mexico
Introduction
Frank Smith, at the age of 53, had little knowledge of sea turtles, and yet built a successful conservation movement in San Francisco, Nayarit, Mexico, with his only tools at the time: grit and compassion. This story starts in 1990 when the Mexican government passed a total ban on sea turtle harvest due to plummeting population numbers worldwide. The next year, the fearless retired U.S. Forest Service employee from the mountains in California moved to San Francisco (more commonly known as San Pancho) to help the turtles’ cause.
Several species of sea turtles, including hawksbills, greens, leatherbacks, and olive ridleys, lay their eggs on the eastern Pacific shores of Mexico. In San Pancho, Frank encountered almost 100% poaching rates, but he stubbornly sweated through clouds of mosquitos on many a rainy night with his local and international volunteers in a bright yellow, famously unreliable, beach dune buggy saving any nest they could find. Throughout his 28 years (and counting) of turtle conservation work, Frank has dealt with poachers, law enforcement, violent storms, animal predators, and threatening cold weather among other daunting obstacles. San Pancho’s well-kept records indicate that Frank and his team of volunteers have released more than one million olive ridley hatchlings and have overall decreased the poaching rates, resulting in an increasing number of nests.
When asked to look back on his story as supervisor of the turtle project Grupo Ecologico de la Costa Verde, Frank offered six pieces of advice for those wanting to save turtles:
• Educate the local children;
• Work with the local police and military;
• Know the community;
• Don’t worry about having a degree;
• Have some alternative income; and
• Think outside the box.
Educate the children
Poachers and dogs were destroying 95% of all turtle nests when the conservation program started its work in 1991. Frank and his friend Scott kept their heads high and eyes open as they walked the beach that first night looking to protect a nesting turtle. Waves rolled back and forth, slowly washing away turtle tracks leading to dozens of empty nest holes and poacher footprints. Each empty nest brought the spirits of the turtle men a little lower as the hopelessness began to sink in. Still, Frank refused to give up. He understood that the project was a learn-as-you-go process, especially since he was working with a very limited amount of sea turtle knowledge.
He was just a gringo in a foreign land with a dream to save the turtles. Over the next 2 weeks, he walked the beach every night and was still only able to find a handful of nests before the poachers took them for sale or consumption. They were outnumbered and out-experienced by about 36 nest hunters along the six beaches they patrolled. The locals didn’t believe Frank and Scott would find more than 10 nests that season. The men were determined to prove the locals wrong. And Frank loves a challenge.
Members of an early environmental group advised Frank that to reduce poaching, he needed to go to the local children. Frank and the members enlisted the help of about 20 local mothers to help teach the children about sea turtles and the environment. There was little to hold the attention of those small, squirming children, ranging in ages from six to 16. There were no VCRs in town, and it was more fun for the kids to use slingshots to kill little lizards and other animals during class. Therefore, he turned to a professor at the nearby University of Guadalajara campus who was willing to teach the children 2 days a week at the university level.
To help bring the professor’s lectures down to earth, Frank and his team brought in several baskets of newly hatched marine turtle hatchlings for the group. Though all lived close to a beach where sea turtles nested, none of the children or their mothers had seen a live hatchling because almost all nests were eaten by people and animals. Their eyes lit up in wonder at the bucket of wriggling gray olive ridley hatchlings. “The kids and mothers just went crazy,” Frank said, “they just couldn’t believe those little turtles came from their beach. They fell in love with them.”
Without a moment’s hesitation, everyone in class gladly raised their hands and pledged to never eat turtle eggs or turtle meat or harm a turtle again. Before long, refrigerators in San Pancho began to fill up with uneaten turtle eggs. Many poachers soon realized that there was no point in scavenging the beach for turtle eggs because their families refused to eat them anymore.
Frank even got young locals to protest with him. Years ago, it was fashionable to wear boots made of turtle skin, especially when crocodiles and alligators became harder to find. Occasionally, Frank would drive into Puerto Vallarta, home to several stores that were known for selling turtle skin boots. The kids of San Pancho would load up into Frank’s vehicle for the journey. While Frank was inside asking about the current deals on turtle merchandise, the children would be outside, protesting the killing of turtles for such purposes. Frank and the small protesters were soon banned from those stores’ premises.
“Education was as important as nest protection. Those 140 kids now have their own children and they pass the information to them,” said Frank. One of those kids was Alejandra Aguirre. After taking those classes in San Pancho, she was inspired to go to college where she got a biology degree, and now runs an award-winning turtle education program and hatchery in the adjacent town, Sayulita. She calls Frank her “turtle grandpa.”
Work with the local government, police, and military
Throughout his years in San Pancho, Frank has had mostly good results working with the local and federal government. A funny example (to some of us) of failed cooperation happened late in the summer of 2001. Frank had planned a sting operation with the local police and the federal Secretary of the Environment and Natural Resources (SEMARNAT). The objective was to catch the remaining poachers of San Pancho. Frank was to patrol the beach normally and simply give the signal when he came across a nest being poached. Everything was set and ready to go.
A turtle laid her nest in front of the center of town. As Frank was digging up the eggs for relocation to a safer spot, three of the sting operations officers, in full uniform complete with the standard issue AK-47 machine guns, jumped him. “They had my face in the sand and my hands in cuffs,” Frank said. He tried to explain to the two officers that he had a permit to protect the eggs; he was not a poacher, but he said it in English. “I think they knew who I was,” he said. Even so, the officers called up SEMARNAT to prove Frank’s innocence. After the phone call, Frank was released. The sting operation had failed, and after that everyone knew about Frank’s intentions to clear the beach of poachers in any way possible.
The famous yellow beach dune buggy remains a valuable tool for getting nests as quickly as possible before the poachers do. Frank wrote in his newsletter, “the poacher travels the beaches barefooted, without the aid of a flashlight, and moves across the rocks between the six beaches agilely, it’s just an easy night’s work.” The sound of the engine alerts poachers that the turtle team is on its way and they cannot outrun it. Sometimes the volunteers carried night vision equipment on patrol. For a time, this kept many of the poachers on the run and wondering how the team was able to put a 1,000,000 candle power spotlight on them so precisely and quickly. In 2017, they tried a new tactic‒psychological games. “To add to the poachers’ misery, we will also be making many fake nests, disguised areas where nests and tracks never existed, including making fake empty nests and refilled nest holes,” he wrote in his newsletter.
Today, instead of using intimidation, when the turtle volunteers come across a poacher, they thank them kindly for the eggs, and most of the time, the poachers hand them over. Alejandra says, “I talk to poachers with respect like they are heroes for finding the nest, it brings them closer to our side. Now they tell me where to look for more nests.” Alejandra also gets calls from the police to ask if she would like an escort on patrol. She gladly accepts the company and the cops get to experience the magic of guarding a beautiful female turtle while she nests under the stars.
Know the community
Frank says it is important for those embarking on sea turtle conservation journeys to know the language and be open to the culture of the area in which the conservation effort is in order to gain the trust and respect of the local residents. When he first arrived in 1991, Frank created waves of outrage in San Pancho by trying to stop the cultural tradition of eating turtle eggs going back centuries to the first inhabitants who were indigenous groups of this area. He knew almost no Spanish, but he feels he was largely successful in his goals because of his relationships with some locals and the trust he built with them.
Juan Flores is a respected local fisherman with a big heart and a large family (which includes his niece Alejandra in Sayulita). Before 1991 he had noticed a decline in the number of nesting turtles on San Pancho beaches himself, so Juan became Frank’s first volunteer. The two shared valuable lessons about sea turtle conservation, including how to find the buried nest on the beach with a stick and to hide nests left where they were laid on the beach by brushing away the mother’s tracks so poachers would not find them as easily.
Remembering how they struggled with language, Juan Flores told us, “In the early days, the bells would go ringing outside our house at night. We knew that meant to go help Frank get the broken-down buggy pulled out of the sand. ‘Buggy’ was the first word I learned in English.
Manuel Murrieta, a prominent member of the community and year-round turtle volunteer, thinks Frank has come a long way in understanding Mexican culture. “Frank has changed the social environment in San Pancho‒people now respect him for his environmental cause,” he says. There is even a monument on the boardwalk honoring Frank and the team of volunteers for the millionth hatchling released in San Pancho. He also received an award for 25 years of committed work in protecting the marine turtles from the Grupo Tortuguero de las Californias (Sea Turtle Network of the Californias in English) in 2017. He wrote in his newsletter, “As I returned to the dining table, Dr. Wallace J. Nichols, who became one of the world’s leading authorities on marine turtle biology and its protection, spoke to us in English. He told several stories of being one of our volunteers in 1995 and 1996, at which time he was a young student at the University of Arizona. I was pleased and honored that our work was noticed by such a noteworthy person.”
Don’t worry about having a degree
Frank is not a biologist; he has a degree in forestry. However, very rarely did not having a degree in marine biology set Frank back. One time, however, when he proposed giving a weekly presentation on the conservation of sea turtles to the guests at one of the San Pancho hotels, management turned Frank away repeatedly because he had no formal biology education. After years of proving himself, the hotel eventually allowed Frank to give his presentation, sell T-shirts, and release hatchlings in front of the hotel, an event that soon became very popular with the guests and helped get the conservation message out to a wider audience. People started coming to San Pancho with a desire to see turtles and visit the project.
To Frank, being in the field and having hands-on experience is much more valuable than a degree in marine biology. As of 2018, 270 turtle volunteers have come through San Pancho, all citizen scientists, passionate about helping the sea turtle population. Those volunteers learned only from their hands-on experience in the field and training by Frank and returning volunteers. You can’t argue about their success when the nursery hatching rate averages 85% over 21 years.
Alejandra agrees that you don’t need a degree. Even though she graduated from a university, she says the professional internship she did at a sea turtle beach in college was the main source of her education and basis of information she uses to run her camp. It is worth noting that because she is a local, a native speaker, and has a degree, she hit the ground running and did not have the same obstacles as her “turtle grandpa” Frank. Instead, she has different ones like balancing the needs of her turtles and her children, both of which she loves dearly.
Have some alternative income
Money is always a limiting factor in any turtle project. Frank has been lucky to have an alternative source of steady income from his retirement pension. Alejandra works in real estate and teaches in schools to keep her family and turtle program running. When funds are low, Frank has been known to sell neighborhood phone directories and T-shirts, and host fundraisers. Alejandra and nearby projects receive donations during hatchling releases and have successfully developed relationships with hotels and restaurants. For example, the turtle groups maintain hotels’ monitoring permits and hatcheries in exchange for salaries and/or marketing. The typical biologist is usually more interested in animals than money, but sometimes you must think outside the box to keep your project running.
Think outside the box
Throughout his adventures, Frank has remained consistent in one thing: thinking outside the box. On a shoe-string budget in the jungle, he has used a beer keg as the gas tank on the dune buggy, a welcome mat as the mud flap, hot chili concoctions as repellants for hungry egg-eating iguanas, and a high-speed cyclone fan to rid termites in the box nursery. In particular, Frank has battled the weather continuously. In 1998, when El Niño rains destroyed the beach hatchery, he asked SEMARNAT what would be the most effective way to save those turtles. Because relocation on the beach was impossible, they decided some of the nests would be taken off the beach and incubated in Styrofoam boxes filled with sand. Those box nests produced surprisingly high hatching success rates. So when Hurricane Kenna ripped through San Pancho and destroyed the beach in October of 2002, Frank’s living room floor disappeared under nest boxes filled with eggs. To this day, box nests do better than the beach hatchery nests in terms of survival in San Pancho.
One reason for this could be lower temperatures in the boxes during the hot season. But low temperatures can be fatal in the cold season. Desperate to mitigate cold weather, in 2000 Frank hooked up hairdryers to a timer to get the nests in boxes back up to a suitable 32 C. In 2002, Frank switched from hair dryers to electric room heaters. In subsequent years he also tried filling all the boxes in the nursery with sand (even if they had no eggs) to keep the entire nursery at a stable temperature, what he calls maintaining thermal mass. In 2004, he had the “bright” idea to string Christmas lights in between the boxes of eggs to keep the nursery warm. The Christmas lights evolved into tube lighting placed in the bottom of the boxes. Later he tried preheating half of the sand that went into the boxes in a pan and then mixing it with cool, damp sand before packing the eggs.
None of these methods were tested scientifically, so we don’t know which worked best, but the lesson is obvious: keep trying and never give up. Endangered species have no time for quitters. As Frank has shown, if you want to save sea turtles, DO IT! And to be successful faster bring your passion, courage, school kids, local community leaders, money, and crazy ideas.
Excerpted from:
Sea Turtle Research and Conservation https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-821029-1.00002-7
Copyright 2021 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
The Science Exchange Seat Turtle Internship Program, San Diego, CA, United States and Puerto Vallarta, Jalisco, Mexico
Introduction
Frank Smith, at the age of 53, had little knowledge of sea turtles, and yet built a successful conservation movement in San Francisco, Nayarit, Mexico, with his only tools at the time: grit and compassion. This story starts in 1990 when the Mexican government passed a total ban on sea turtle harvest due to plummeting population numbers worldwide. The next year, the fearless retired U.S. Forest Service employee from the mountains in California moved to San Francisco (more commonly known as San Pancho) to help the turtles’ cause.
Several species of sea turtles, including hawksbills, greens, leatherbacks, and olive ridleys, lay their eggs on the eastern Pacific shores of Mexico. In San Pancho, Frank encountered almost 100% poaching rates, but he stubbornly sweated through clouds of mosquitos on many a rainy night with his local and international volunteers in a bright yellow, famously unreliable, beach dune buggy saving any nest they could find. Throughout his 28 years (and counting) of turtle conservation work, Frank has dealt with poachers, law enforcement, violent storms, animal predators, and threatening cold weather among other daunting obstacles. San Pancho’s well-kept records indicate that Frank and his team of volunteers have released more than one million olive ridley hatchlings and have overall decreased the poaching rates, resulting in an increasing number of nests.
When asked to look back on his story as supervisor of the turtle project Grupo Ecologico de la Costa Verde, Frank offered six pieces of advice for those wanting to save turtles:
• Educate the local children;
• Work with the local police and military;
• Know the community;
• Don’t worry about having a degree;
• Have some alternative income; and
• Think outside the box.
Educate the children
Poachers and dogs were destroying 95% of all turtle nests when the conservation program started its work in 1991. Frank and his friend Scott kept their heads high and eyes open as they walked the beach that first night looking to protect a nesting turtle. Waves rolled back and forth, slowly washing away turtle tracks leading to dozens of empty nest holes and poacher footprints. Each empty nest brought the spirits of the turtle men a little lower as the hopelessness began to sink in. Still, Frank refused to give up. He understood that the project was a learn-as-you-go process, especially since he was working with a very limited amount of sea turtle knowledge.
He was just a gringo in a foreign land with a dream to save the turtles. Over the next 2 weeks, he walked the beach every night and was still only able to find a handful of nests before the poachers took them for sale or consumption. They were outnumbered and out-experienced by about 36 nest hunters along the six beaches they patrolled. The locals didn’t believe Frank and Scott would find more than 10 nests that season. The men were determined to prove the locals wrong. And Frank loves a challenge.
Members of an early environmental group advised Frank that to reduce poaching, he needed to go to the local children. Frank and the members enlisted the help of about 20 local mothers to help teach the children about sea turtles and the environment. There was little to hold the attention of those small, squirming children, ranging in ages from six to 16. There were no VCRs in town, and it was more fun for the kids to use slingshots to kill little lizards and other animals during class. Therefore, he turned to a professor at the nearby University of Guadalajara campus who was willing to teach the children 2 days a week at the university level.
To help bring the professor’s lectures down to earth, Frank and his team brought in several baskets of newly hatched marine turtle hatchlings for the group. Though all lived close to a beach where sea turtles nested, none of the children or their mothers had seen a live hatchling because almost all nests were eaten by people and animals. Their eyes lit up in wonder at the bucket of wriggling gray olive ridley hatchlings. “The kids and mothers just went crazy,” Frank said, “they just couldn’t believe those little turtles came from their beach. They fell in love with them.”
Without a moment’s hesitation, everyone in class gladly raised their hands and pledged to never eat turtle eggs or turtle meat or harm a turtle again. Before long, refrigerators in San Pancho began to fill up with uneaten turtle eggs. Many poachers soon realized that there was no point in scavenging the beach for turtle eggs because their families refused to eat them anymore.
Frank even got young locals to protest with him. Years ago, it was fashionable to wear boots made of turtle skin, especially when crocodiles and alligators became harder to find. Occasionally, Frank would drive into Puerto Vallarta, home to several stores that were known for selling turtle skin boots. The kids of San Pancho would load up into Frank’s vehicle for the journey. While Frank was inside asking about the current deals on turtle merchandise, the children would be outside, protesting the killing of turtles for such purposes. Frank and the small protesters were soon banned from those stores’ premises.
“Education was as important as nest protection. Those 140 kids now have their own children and they pass the information to them,” said Frank. One of those kids was Alejandra Aguirre. After taking those classes in San Pancho, she was inspired to go to college where she got a biology degree, and now runs an award-winning turtle education program and hatchery in the adjacent town, Sayulita. She calls Frank her “turtle grandpa.”
Work with the local government, police, and military
Throughout his years in San Pancho, Frank has had mostly good results working with the local and federal government. A funny example (to some of us) of failed cooperation happened late in the summer of 2001. Frank had planned a sting operation with the local police and the federal Secretary of the Environment and Natural Resources (SEMARNAT). The objective was to catch the remaining poachers of San Pancho. Frank was to patrol the beach normally and simply give the signal when he came across a nest being poached. Everything was set and ready to go.
A turtle laid her nest in front of the center of town. As Frank was digging up the eggs for relocation to a safer spot, three of the sting operations officers, in full uniform complete with the standard issue AK-47 machine guns, jumped him. “They had my face in the sand and my hands in cuffs,” Frank said. He tried to explain to the two officers that he had a permit to protect the eggs; he was not a poacher, but he said it in English. “I think they knew who I was,” he said. Even so, the officers called up SEMARNAT to prove Frank’s innocence. After the phone call, Frank was released. The sting operation had failed, and after that everyone knew about Frank’s intentions to clear the beach of poachers in any way possible.
The famous yellow beach dune buggy remains a valuable tool for getting nests as quickly as possible before the poachers do. Frank wrote in his newsletter, “the poacher travels the beaches barefooted, without the aid of a flashlight, and moves across the rocks between the six beaches agilely, it’s just an easy night’s work.” The sound of the engine alerts poachers that the turtle team is on its way and they cannot outrun it. Sometimes the volunteers carried night vision equipment on patrol. For a time, this kept many of the poachers on the run and wondering how the team was able to put a 1,000,000 candle power spotlight on them so precisely and quickly. In 2017, they tried a new tactic‒psychological games. “To add to the poachers’ misery, we will also be making many fake nests, disguised areas where nests and tracks never existed, including making fake empty nests and refilled nest holes,” he wrote in his newsletter.
Today, instead of using intimidation, when the turtle volunteers come across a poacher, they thank them kindly for the eggs, and most of the time, the poachers hand them over. Alejandra says, “I talk to poachers with respect like they are heroes for finding the nest, it brings them closer to our side. Now they tell me where to look for more nests.” Alejandra also gets calls from the police to ask if she would like an escort on patrol. She gladly accepts the company and the cops get to experience the magic of guarding a beautiful female turtle while she nests under the stars.
Know the community
Frank says it is important for those embarking on sea turtle conservation journeys to know the language and be open to the culture of the area in which the conservation effort is in order to gain the trust and respect of the local residents. When he first arrived in 1991, Frank created waves of outrage in San Pancho by trying to stop the cultural tradition of eating turtle eggs going back centuries to the first inhabitants who were indigenous groups of this area. He knew almost no Spanish, but he feels he was largely successful in his goals because of his relationships with some locals and the trust he built with them.
Juan Flores is a respected local fisherman with a big heart and a large family (which includes his niece Alejandra in Sayulita). Before 1991 he had noticed a decline in the number of nesting turtles on San Pancho beaches himself, so Juan became Frank’s first volunteer. The two shared valuable lessons about sea turtle conservation, including how to find the buried nest on the beach with a stick and to hide nests left where they were laid on the beach by brushing away the mother’s tracks so poachers would not find them as easily.
Remembering how they struggled with language, Juan Flores told us, “In the early days, the bells would go ringing outside our house at night. We knew that meant to go help Frank get the broken-down buggy pulled out of the sand. ‘Buggy’ was the first word I learned in English.
Manuel Murrieta, a prominent member of the community and year-round turtle volunteer, thinks Frank has come a long way in understanding Mexican culture. “Frank has changed the social environment in San Pancho‒people now respect him for his environmental cause,” he says. There is even a monument on the boardwalk honoring Frank and the team of volunteers for the millionth hatchling released in San Pancho. He also received an award for 25 years of committed work in protecting the marine turtles from the Grupo Tortuguero de las Californias (Sea Turtle Network of the Californias in English) in 2017. He wrote in his newsletter, “As I returned to the dining table, Dr. Wallace J. Nichols, who became one of the world’s leading authorities on marine turtle biology and its protection, spoke to us in English. He told several stories of being one of our volunteers in 1995 and 1996, at which time he was a young student at the University of Arizona. I was pleased and honored that our work was noticed by such a noteworthy person.”
Don’t worry about having a degree
Frank is not a biologist; he has a degree in forestry. However, very rarely did not having a degree in marine biology set Frank back. One time, however, when he proposed giving a weekly presentation on the conservation of sea turtles to the guests at one of the San Pancho hotels, management turned Frank away repeatedly because he had no formal biology education. After years of proving himself, the hotel eventually allowed Frank to give his presentation, sell T-shirts, and release hatchlings in front of the hotel, an event that soon became very popular with the guests and helped get the conservation message out to a wider audience. People started coming to San Pancho with a desire to see turtles and visit the project.
To Frank, being in the field and having hands-on experience is much more valuable than a degree in marine biology. As of 2018, 270 turtle volunteers have come through San Pancho, all citizen scientists, passionate about helping the sea turtle population. Those volunteers learned only from their hands-on experience in the field and training by Frank and returning volunteers. You can’t argue about their success when the nursery hatching rate averages 85% over 21 years.
Alejandra agrees that you don’t need a degree. Even though she graduated from a university, she says the professional internship she did at a sea turtle beach in college was the main source of her education and basis of information she uses to run her camp. It is worth noting that because she is a local, a native speaker, and has a degree, she hit the ground running and did not have the same obstacles as her “turtle grandpa” Frank. Instead, she has different ones like balancing the needs of her turtles and her children, both of which she loves dearly.
Have some alternative income
Money is always a limiting factor in any turtle project. Frank has been lucky to have an alternative source of steady income from his retirement pension. Alejandra works in real estate and teaches in schools to keep her family and turtle program running. When funds are low, Frank has been known to sell neighborhood phone directories and T-shirts, and host fundraisers. Alejandra and nearby projects receive donations during hatchling releases and have successfully developed relationships with hotels and restaurants. For example, the turtle groups maintain hotels’ monitoring permits and hatcheries in exchange for salaries and/or marketing. The typical biologist is usually more interested in animals than money, but sometimes you must think outside the box to keep your project running.
Think outside the box
Throughout his adventures, Frank has remained consistent in one thing: thinking outside the box. On a shoe-string budget in the jungle, he has used a beer keg as the gas tank on the dune buggy, a welcome mat as the mud flap, hot chili concoctions as repellants for hungry egg-eating iguanas, and a high-speed cyclone fan to rid termites in the box nursery. In particular, Frank has battled the weather continuously. In 1998, when El Niño rains destroyed the beach hatchery, he asked SEMARNAT what would be the most effective way to save those turtles. Because relocation on the beach was impossible, they decided some of the nests would be taken off the beach and incubated in Styrofoam boxes filled with sand. Those box nests produced surprisingly high hatching success rates. So when Hurricane Kenna ripped through San Pancho and destroyed the beach in October of 2002, Frank’s living room floor disappeared under nest boxes filled with eggs. To this day, box nests do better than the beach hatchery nests in terms of survival in San Pancho.
One reason for this could be lower temperatures in the boxes during the hot season. But low temperatures can be fatal in the cold season. Desperate to mitigate cold weather, in 2000 Frank hooked up hairdryers to a timer to get the nests in boxes back up to a suitable 32 C. In 2002, Frank switched from hair dryers to electric room heaters. In subsequent years he also tried filling all the boxes in the nursery with sand (even if they had no eggs) to keep the entire nursery at a stable temperature, what he calls maintaining thermal mass. In 2004, he had the “bright” idea to string Christmas lights in between the boxes of eggs to keep the nursery warm. The Christmas lights evolved into tube lighting placed in the bottom of the boxes. Later he tried preheating half of the sand that went into the boxes in a pan and then mixing it with cool, damp sand before packing the eggs.
None of these methods were tested scientifically, so we don’t know which worked best, but the lesson is obvious: keep trying and never give up. Endangered species have no time for quitters. As Frank has shown, if you want to save sea turtles, DO IT! And to be successful faster bring your passion, courage, school kids, local community leaders, money, and crazy ideas.
Excerpted from:
Sea Turtle Research and Conservation https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-821029-1.00002-7
Copyright 2021 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.