Photographs by Bill Curtsinger / Text by Anne and Jack Rudloe

We hardly know them. It was only in 1954 that the father of sea turtle research, a visionary herpetologist, the late Archie Carr, set up camp on the beach at Tortuguero, Costa Rica, to begin to study why green turtle populations had plummeted and how to protect them. Today an international army of biologists and volunteers are trying to understand the ways of sea turtles and save them from extinction. But, despite the explosion of research, scientists are frustrated. "I don’t know any branch of science where we have applied so much effort and learned so little," said Richard Byles of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. "We don’t know where each species grows to maturity, or how long it takes them to grow up, or what the survival rates are."

While scientists gather information, turtles are dying. All eight species are endangered or threatened. They are killed for meat and leather; their eggs are taken for food and aphrodisiacs. Their nesting sites go for development. They are ground up by dredges, run over by pleasure boats, poisoned by pollution, strangled by trash, and drowned by fishline and net. We could be at the turning point of saving these ancient beasts—or of losing them.

NGM 1994/02