CANADA EAST (Fredericton, New Brunswick) 07 March 06 N.S. conference aims to understand leatherback turtles' secretive lifestyle
Halifax (CP): Just a few months before thousands of leatherback turtles head to Nova Scotia's rich coastline to feed on jellyfish, about 30 biologists from around the world have gathered in Halifax to assess the health of these critically endangered reptiles.
The week-long conference, led by the U.S. National Marine Fisheries Services, will present the latest research on these unusual beasts.
Covered in leathery skin rather than a hard shell, adult leatherbacks are often more than two metres long and can weigh nearly 900 kilograms.
"The population is larger in the Atlantic than in the Pacific, but the numbers aren't very clear," said Mike James, a biologist who helps tag and study the turtles as part of his work with the Nova Scotia Leatherback Turtle Working Group.
The most recent stock assessment, released in 1996, estimated there were less than 35,000 nesting females worldwide.
In recent years, researchers have discovered that thousands of turtles routinely travel north from their birthplaces on South American and Caribbean beaches to the Scotian Shelf, the shallow portion of the continental shelf that extends from Nova Scotia into the North Atlantic.
"This area is . . . the place where we can do an awful lot of good research on the animals," said James. "This has allowed us to fill in some critical life history gaps of the species in just a few years."
The turtles have also been spotted in the southern Gulf of St. Lawrence and along Newfoundland's south coast, from mid-summer to the end of September.
With the help of a network of fishermen, the leatherback working group has tagged 103 turtles since 1998.
"The last six years, the numbers have been pretty high," said Bert Fricker, a Cape Breton fisherman who's been tagging turtles for seven years. "If you go back 20 years, there was a period when we'd hardly see any. It seems like something changed. They seem to be coming farther north."
Tagging is one of the few ways to study the turtles as they cannot be raised to maturity in captivity. Leatherbacks can't swim backwards, which means they often injure themselves when held in tanks.
As a result, it remains unclear how quickly these mysterious creatures grow or how long they live.
N.S. conference aims to understand leatherback turtles' secretive lifestyle