Sea Turtle Protection

Research on Sea Turtle from Asia

This report is written in order to educate the reader about the endangered Olive Ridley sea turtle, a species of marine life that conducts its unique and famous nesting ritual on Vizag’s shores; and the efforts in place by the Visakha Society for the Protection and Care of Animals (VSPCA) to protect it. All data is collected, maintained and interpreted by the VSPCA.

Over the last few years, rapid development along the Vizag coast and increasing pollution levels in our city have been causing severe deterioration of our environment, making it utterly difficult for sea turtles to nest here. There have been cases of mother turtles being unable to find a proper place to lay their eggs on account of horrifically dirty conditions in our polluted beach, and so they lay eggs in the water itself, with no hope for eggs to survive. It is tragic because this constrains our efforts to conserve this highly endangered marine creature that has been around in our planet from the time of the dinosaurs. The mighty dinosaurs had become extinct, their kind unable to survive the earth, whereas these humble creatures of the sea continued, until today.

According to the Marine Turtle Specialist Group (MTSG) of the IUCN, there has been a 50% reduction in population size since the 1960s. Although some nesting populations have increased in the past few years, the overall reduction is greater than the overall increase. Expansion of the shrimp trawling fishery in the eastern Indian Ocean in the mid-1970s has resulted in numerous olive ridley deaths. Over 10,000 olive ridley carcasses a year have been counted on the Orissa coast since 1999. These carcasses have largely been attributed to the shrimp trawl fishery, but trawling is not the only source of olive ridley mortality in the eastern Indian Ocean.

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Stream Benthic Invertebrates %EPT – Gwaii Haanas

DataSet on Benthic Invertibrates from North America

The EPT index measures the proportion of freshwater organisms belonging to the taxa Ephemeroptera, Plecoptera, Trichoptera (or EPT for short). These species are considered to be highly sensitive to pollution and are a measure of good environmental conditions.

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Stream Benthic Invertebrates – Prince Edward Island

DataSet on Benthic Invertibrates from North America

Stream benthic invertebrates are important indicators of aquatic health and have been monitored in PEI National Park to assess community diversity as well as abundance of pollution tolerant and intolerant taxa in streams.

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Fish Communities – Forillon

DataSet on Brook Trout from North America

This dataset covers electrofishing efforts in 11 streams or rivers in Forillon National Park since 2008. The abundance, size structure and condition of the fish in a brook trout population are sensitive to changes in the environment, specifically those caused by the presence of an invasive alien species, pollution or climate change, making this measure a good indicator of the health of the aquatic ecosystem.

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Great Lakes Fish Contaminants Monitoring and Surveillance Data

DataSet on Fish from North America

Monitoring and surveillance data on the concentration of contaminants in selected species of fish and other aquatic biota collected to determine the environmental trends in contaminant levels and relationship to sources of pollution, the effectiveness of management actions, and the risk to fish and fish-consuming wildlife in the Great Lakes aquatic ecosystem are included in this dataset.

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