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Species Spotlight: The Green Sea Turtle
The green sea turtle is a creature of many distinctions: big, well-traveled, ancient—and endangered.
Named for the color of the fat under its shell, the green sea turtle, which averages 300 to 350 pounds and more than three feet in shell length when fully grown, is the second-largest turtle species in the world.
True mariners, these creatures often travel more than 1,000 miles from their feeding grounds to the tropical beaches where they mate and nest. Researchers recently determined that the turtles use “magnetic mapping”—the biological equivalent of a global positioning system—to navigate on their lengthy journeys.
Green sea turtles belong to one of the oldest turtle groups and predate humans by about 130 million years. And though they’ve plied the seas and shuffled on the beaches for millions of years before humans arrived, it is our presence that is causing sharp declines in their numbers.
Through hunting for meat and egg collection, loss of habitat by development and accidental capture in fishing gear, the population of green sea turtles has dropped from millions to perhaps less than 200,000 worldwide. Only a tiny fraction of the females can be found nesting on U.S. beaches, primarily on the east coast of Florida. Thus their classification as an endangered species—a distinction they could surely live without.
