After Decades of Decline, Some Good News Is Here for Green Sea Turtles
The International Union for Conservation of Nature no longer considers the marine creatures endangered and has instead reclassified them as a species of least concern
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After decades of decline, green sea turtles are making a comeback. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) no longer considers the marine creatures endangered, instead reclassifying them as a “species of least concern” in its influential conservation index. The conservation category contains abundant and well-distributed species that face no significant danger of extinction.
Conservationists celebrated the good news, but they also cautioned that, while green sea turtles are rebounding globally, several subpopulations are still threatened. Without continued protections, the species could easily slip backwards, they warn.
Found in tropical and subtropical waters across the globe, green turtles (Chelonia mydas) were once so abundant that during Christopher Columbus’ voyages, sailors “could navigate at night around islands by the sounds of turtles breathing and their hard shells bonking into the wooden hulls of the boats,” Bryan Wallace, an ecologist at the University of Colorado Boulder who led the IUCN’s most recent assessment of the species, tells NPR’s “Morning Edition.”
Key takeaway: Animals and plants face extinction worldwide
Currently, about one in three species listed on the IUCN Red List is threatened with extinction. Not all the listed species are animals—plants can have threatened status, too. One surprising threat category? Conifers. According to the list, 34 percent of species of conifer, including Madagascar's extremely rare Podocarpus perrieri trees, are currently threatened.But European colonizers began exploiting the creatures for their meat and decorative shells, causing populations to plummet. Over the years, hunters killed off 95 percent of the estimated 19 million to 33 million green sea turtles once living throughout the Caribbean, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Even when unsustainable hunting and trade began to decline, green sea turtles faced new threats, including pollution, habitat loss, rising sea levels and warmer temperatures resulting from climate change, and entanglement in fishing gear.
However, concerted conservation efforts have been underway since the 1950s—from legal protections to “turtle excluder devices” meant to prevent them from getting stuck in fishing nets—and those initiatives appear to be working.
The global population has increased by around 28 percent since the 1970s, according to the IUCN’s latest update to its Red List of Threatened Species, which it shared October 10 at the IUCN World Conservation Congress in the United Arab Emirates.
“Sea turtles are iconic and charismatic species. … They inspire people,” Brendan Godley, a conservation scientist at the University of Exeter in England, tells the BBC’s Helen Briggs. “Hundreds of thousands of people have been working for decades to try and look after these creatures, and undoubtedly, it has had an impact.”
Some subpopulations are still in trouble, however, including those in the North Indian Ocean and the East Pacific. Though green turtles are considered a species of least concern in the North Atlantic, scientists worry about lower nesting numbers in places like Costa Rica in recent years, reports Mongabay’s Shreya Dasgupta. And other species of sea turtles are still seriously struggling, including critically endangered hawksbill and Kemp’s ridley turtles.
Still, conservationists say the downlisting of green sea turtles is a major win.
“People can have hope,” Wallace tells NPR. “And people can act on the things that they are inspired by and the things that they find beauty and awe in. Find something you love close to you that really means a lot … and fight like hell to make sure it stays there.”
Beyond green turtles, the latest update to the IUCN Red List inventory of endangered species includes changes to several other species listings. Six species are now considered extinct, including the Christmas Island shrew and the slender-billed curlew, which hasn’t been spotted since 1995.
The hooded seal is now listed as endangered, while the bearded seal and harp seal have been redesignated as near threatened. All three species face danger from global warming, which is melting the sea ice they need to survive. They’re also vulnerable to hunting, entanglement in fishing gear, oil and mineral exploitation, shipping, and noise pollution.
Experts have also determined that 61 percent of global bird species are declining, up from 44 percent in 2016. In places like Madagascar, West Africa and Central America, species that inhabit forests are particularly vulnerable, as logging and agricultural expansion are reducing their habitat, according to the IUCN.
Overall, 48,646 of the 172,620 species in the IUCN’s database are now threatened with extinction.
“The Red List records symptoms of extinctions,” says Jon Paul Rodríguez, chair of IUCN’s Species Survival Commission, to CNN’s Nell Lewis. “It’s like a thermometer when you are sick … you’re measuring something that tells you there’s something wrong; we have to act.”
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