Sea Turtle Stories – Episode 6

Minnie: So Dr. Joana is a marine conservationist and biologist originally from Lima in Peru with over 25 years of experience in the field of marine conservation. She’s the founder of ProDelphinus, a non-profit organization in Lima that works with fishing communities, researchers and the government to protect sea turtles and marine fauna by studying and reducing bycatch.
Dr. Joana is also a professor at the Universidad Científica del Sur and is extensively published within the field of sea turtle conservation, specifically focusing on bycatch. So you’ve done so much amazing work into fisheries and we’re really excited to be able to talk to you today. Welcome Dr. Joana and thanks so much for being with us.

Dr Joanna: Yeah, thank you Minnie. It’s a pleasure to talk about turtles always.

Minnie: Always, pretty much my number one favorite thing to do. So I guess to get us started, I would love to define some terms here. What exactly is bycatch and why is it so important that we study it in the context of sea turtle conservation?

Dr Joanna: Sure, so whenever the fishermen go to fish and they will send the nets looking for what we call the target species. The standard species could be anchovies, could be mackerel, could be octopus, but when they send the nets there is always a species that are not the target catch, the target species that they are looking for. Sometimes these fishermen can catch a turtle and that’s obviously not something that they want and that’s why we call this incidental catch or bycatch. Bycatch could be turtles, seabirds, mammals, but for this call we can talk and try to explain a little bit more about turtle bycatch.

Minnie: Okay, yeah, so this is quite a big risk and this is quite a well-known kind of threat to sea turtles globally is being caught as incidental catch or bycatch. So your work is specifically focused on bycatch in small-scale fishing and artisanal fishing, specifically in Peru. Could you explain to us what are small-scale fisheries then? How does that maybe differ from commercial fishing, if at all?

Dr Joanna: Sure, so you can imagine a big vessel, a big boat that will catch thousands and hundreds of tons of fish. So that image will be what we call industrial fisheries. Usually vessels with a large capacity they can go fish and bring back tons of fish. But there’s also the small-scale boats.

These are perhaps at the most 15 meters in Peru. That’s the regulation, that’s the threshold that will separate small-scale and industrial fisheries. So these small-scale boats in Peru are typically made of wood and they are handmade and the labor at this kind of boat is usually manual. So they won’t have gear or motors to reel the nets. That’s how we can easily identify the small-scale boat from an industrial boat.

Minnie: Okay, is small-scale fishing predominantly in your experience then for more like personal usage or sort of small-scale local selling rather than obviously international trade or anything?

Dr Joanna: That’s a very good question and the answer will change among countries.
For example, in Peru there is a fishery that it’s called for subsistence. It will be typically a small boat and most of the fish will go to eat at home and that’s more common in the rainforest in Peru. The small-scale boats that are in the coast and the marine environment along Peru are typically to sell in domestic markets and some of the boats sell also to international markets.
For example, giant squids or mahi-mahi or tuna will typically go for export while other fish perhaps bonito or smaller pelagics will be for the local market. Something that I want to stress for Peruvians at least is that most of the fish that is caught with the industrial boats, the big ones, goes for exporting. The majority of it if not all.

While the food or the fish we eat at home or in restaurants in Peru are coming all 100% from the small-scale vessel.

Minnie: Okay, interesting. So yeah, there is quite a difference. So you’ve been working a lot with small-scale fisheries. What kind of got you interested in this area of marine conservation and this kind of work?

Dr Joanna: Yeah, so in a given population of animals you want to know basic numbers. How many are born every year or every season? How many die every season or every year? So it’s important for us to know how many die from fissures, for example, for a couple of reasons.
One will be for the conservation threats. For example, in case of the Eastern Pacific leatherback turtle, which is a critically endangered population, just the death of one animal, it has lots of implications. But in particular, it’s not good for the population.

But in the case of fisheries, it’s also not good for the reputation of the fisheries. Let’s say there is a fishery that one that is looking for certification. If they catch turtles, they have to do something about it.

Sometimes the animals that are incidental bycatch are alive. That you can release and they go back to the water. Sometimes they’re dead and a fraction of people in the country still use it for consumption at home.

But that is when biologists or researchers can help. We can provide the tools that the fisheries can use to release the animals or explain how to release them better so the turtles have more chance to survive after they are released back in the water. So those are overlaps between fisheries and conservation of, in this case, turtles.

Minnie: Yeah, I guess it’s always so interlinked. So yeah, by being able to conserve sea turtles, we can also conserve some of the fishermen’s lifestyles and their income because catching some of these big marine megafauna will also destroy their nets as well, which is an expensive undertaking for people who have very small margins. So we can help each other and ultimately help the turtles as well.

Dr Joanna: Yeah, it’s important to work with fishermen because we not only care about the animals. Of course, we have a special place in our hearts for turtles, but we also care for the people that are related to this environment, this marine environment. The ocean is not ours, it’s everybody’s.

Minnie: Yeah, because I think the latest figures are something out of a global population. Over three billion people rely on seafood as their predominant protein source. So that’s a massive amount of people.

Dr Joanna: So that’s the challenge. I mean, how do we make fisheries sustainable? How do we make them last? But also, how do we make them sustainable to not harm or affect other species like turtles?

Minnie: And then for our interests, what makes a turtle kind of vulnerable to being caught in these nets? Is it they can’t see them? Are they attracted to them as well, like the fish? Do we kind of have an idea of what makes them at risk?

Dr Joanna: I want to say that it’s the overlap of both groups. One side, the fishermen, one side, the turtles. They’re both looking for food and they cross over roads in the ocean. So typically when there is fish, there’s going to be turtles around. Perhaps they’re not foraging over the fish, but they are going to be foraging over the preys that the fish are catching.

Minnie: So you’ve worked on basically how can we reduce bycatch in small-scale fisheries in Peru. What are some of the things you found out?

Dr Joanna: Yeah, that’s a fun question. For many years, we documented how many turtles were dying in the fishery. I mean, that’s a number that we need for turtle population estimates. So once we had those numbers, they showed to be very high. But then we identified that there was a need for finding solutions.

So there have been studies of how animals use sensorial cues, because like we humans have five senses. That’s the same, of course, with animals. So previous research showed that lights help some animals to see better because they have a good vision.

So we tested for many years in different fisheries, in different ports, placing lights, LED lights in the fishing nets. And what showed was maybe between 30 and 40 percent reduction in turtles caught in nets that were illuminated compared to those nets that were not illuminated. So right there, that was a solution that we offer as a contribution.

When fishermen ask us, what can I do? It’s like, you can use lights. You can increase the vision so the turtles know that there is a barrier coming up.

Minnie: Can they be added to nets or do they have to buy nets with them attached?

Dr Joanna: Yeah, so so far we have tested the ones that you add to the net. But there’s several variations. I think it was in Mexico where the main lines of the net were fluorescent. So they will be more visible in the water, especially at night. Some other researchers are using also the lights but charged by solar panels that will reduce the use of batteries.So when there’s more research, there’s going to be more options available.

Minnie: Yeah, lots of different options for lots of different situations, I guess. But I realize I should probably ask first about the Eastern Pacific leatherback. Is that a particular species that is vulnerable in the area that you work in? Or is there any species that is considered sort of more vulnerable than others?

Dr Joanna: So for us, it’s always a concern when we know that in the area there is critically endangered population. So out of the five species of turtles, three of them that occur in Peru are critically endangered. Leatherbacks, hawksbills, and loggerheads of the South Pacific.
Leatherbacks, we know they’re nesting in Mexico or in Costa Rica, and they come down to Peru to forage. And that’s when they will get incidentally caught. And the case of loggerheads, that’s a very compelling story because they’re born in Queensland in Australia.

And then they cross the Pacific to forage in Peruvian waters. And they are going to go back to Australia only when they become subadults or larger sizes. So those are the species that whatever we can do to help their survival, we have to do it.

Minnie: So then in that case, are you finding more adult leatherbacks and juvenile loggerheads? Are we finding very different life stages being at risk in this area?

Dr Joanna: So in the case of loggerheads, most of the ones that are caught in Peru waters are juveniles. Very few subadults, very few. The leatherbacks, the majority are still juveniles and subadults, and a small fraction of adults.

But all of them are going to be interacting with a fleet of small scale fisheries.

Minnie: It’s interesting because sea turtles are truly global citizens. Poor little baby loggers, that’s such a long way for them to go, isn’t it? It’s amazing.
They’ve come from Australia and they’re really very cool how far they travel.

Dr Joanna: I know, that’s like 5,000 kilometers right there.

Minnie: And of course, obviously, it’s pretty devastating only to be caught in a net when they’ve reached their destination, which is obviously what we’d like to try and avoid.

Dr Joanna: Yeah, I know. But those stories about migration is very interesting also for fishermen because they see turtles and they have no idea where they’re coming from. But once you tell them, look, this animal is coming all the way from Australia, so you better do something to release them fast and help them, then they understand. It’s pretty incredible.

Minnie: Yeah, I guess sometimes people just wouldn’t be aware.

Dr Joanna: Yeah, true.

Minnie: Okay, yeah. So then you mentioned before about a lot of sea turtles actually can be released from incidental catch. They can be alive and they can be released.
So obviously, then bycatch doesn’t always lead to mortality. But what are some of the ways to prevent mortality in turtles that have been incidentally caught? What can the fishermen do to prevent that?

Dr Joanna: Well, there is the surface nets, the midwater and the bottom ones. Usually, if a turtle is trapped in the midwater or in the bottom ones, they drown because they can’t go up, dragging the whole gear to the surface.
The turtles that are caught in the surface nets, they have typically more chance to be alive because they can still breathe in the surface. And the same will happen with surface long lines. Because they’re in the surface, the turtle can also hang by the surface area to breathe.
So fishermen cannot do much on the way the turtle is caught. But what they can do is they can release them as fast as possible. If it’s a healthy, very vivid animal, release them as fast as possible because they will have more chances to go back to the water instead of being stressed in the boat.

Another thing they can do is there’s techniques on ways to hold the turtle. Like don’t hang them by the flipper or be careful with the area of the head and the neck. There are ways to hold them properly so they can have more chance to survive once they go back in the water.

Minnie: Would you say the biggest cause of the mortality really is that the turtles actually drown?

Dr Joanna: Yeah, so that would be the biggest. And then another one could be how injured it is. If the hook, for example, went through the roof of the mouth, it’s closer to the brain area.
So maybe that’s not an ideal situation. But if the hook, for example, is in the tip of the mouth, it’s more easy to remove the hook, for example.

Minnie: You mentioned before at the beginning how sometimes bycatch can maybe turn into normal catch. Do the fishermen sometimes keep the turtles that have been accidentally caught for consumption or commercial use in some way?

Dr Joanna: Yeah, this still happens in some regions in the central and the north coast. There’s still beliefs that turtles will bring medicinal uses. Like if you drink the blood, it’s good for anemia.
Or if you rub the oil, it’s good for your joints. You know, it’s this side of misconceptions or wrong information or something they learn from their parents or grandparents that has remained into their families, unfortunately.

Minnie: I suppose you worked really closely with the fishermen. And it’s obviously a super important part of any conservation effort is to engage those key people involved. Did you find that fishermen were quite open to mitigating these sort of risks? Were they, I guess, on board and kind of understood the work you were doing? Or did you find anyresistance?

Dr Joanna: Yeah, so that’s a very interesting question. I think in general, I could say that older generations have more fixed set of minds than the younger generations.
And in general, being a fisherman is like any other profession. There are professionals that are very good, like right on top of things. And there are professionals that are not so good.
So maybe it will be harder to pass on the message or to make them attend to workshops. And I have seen a change over time, in fact.

And also because there’s better regulations these days or there is international treaties also that support these conservation measures.

Minnie: Okay, interesting. You’ve done some research where you’ve kind of actually obviously had to measure the amount of bycatch taken. So you’ve kind of been there observing.
Is there sort of audits like that? Maybe like government involvement to have people kind of checking the bycatch, kind of getting the data, I guess. Is that something that does happen? Or is it relatively hard to get that information?

Dr Joanna: I think it’s getting better, the participation of government agencies in bycatch. And I think it’s a bit of a gray area because bycatch, the catch of these species is forbidden, it’s illegal.
So then fishermen don’t report it because authorities are telling them it’s illegal. I don’t know any single report of a bycatch in all my years working. I’m going to retire the day they started reporting to the authorities and they receive a good guidance on what to do with bycatch.
Yeah, that’s a grey area that still needs attention.

Minnie: Would it be fair to say that it’s probably very underestimated, the bycatch issues for sea turtles and I suppose other marine life that we actually don’t have a very good idea of the significance and severity of the issue?

Dr Joanna: Totally. So true. It’s totally underestimated. I don’t know any fisheries in general that are reporting the bycatch as I mentioned. Not only for turtles or mammals or marine megafauna that is very difficult to hide, but also for the small fish or the species that nobody’s paying attention on because they’re not charismatic or they don’t have any conservation threats.

So it’s a very unreported activity. And it’s also very hard because everything occurs at sea. We are not equipped to be at sea all the time and authorities either. They sometimes don’t have the right vessels or they don’t have the budget for the gasoline. So they’re relying on the things that are brought ashore. But not everything is brought. They discard a lot of species that have no commercial value.

Minnie: But I guess that’s where, you know, stuff like your research comes in to try and clear a little bit of that and also help to mitigate that. I also read in some of your work that you were using radio broadcasting to reach out to fishers at sea. Can you tell me a little bit more about what you were doing with that particular kind of angle?

Dr Joanna: Sure. I remember we had to do some work with the turtles and the only way to communicate with the fishermen was through the radio. And that’s something that they do on a regular basis.

The families want to know how their husbands are doing or how their sons are doing atsea because they will go to fish for two weeks, three weeks sometimes. So they want to know if everything is okay. So some vessels have this radio and at the ports there’s also a station and they will communicate not only to check about everything is okay or not, but also when there’s failure of the vessel, the motor crashed sometimes, or if somebody is sick, or if they want to know the price of the species they caught. Is it a good price there or they better go to another port? So we realized that that was a good way to communicate with the fishermen when they were at sea. And at sea they seem to have more time to relax than when they were on land where they just want to be at home resting with their families. They don’t want to come to a workshop.

If they are, if they have three days of resting they don’t want to waste an hour to go to a workshop. So this was a good balance for us, a good venue that we identified. This is a good time. We identified the best hours to communicate with them. And we have great stories. I mean there was a guy, his boat was adrifted and we were only, we were the only ones to communicate with them.

So as soon as we heard the boat has been broken for three days, they needed to get in touch with their families and with their authorities. So we did those calls and a boat was sent to them to help them. And we met them months later.

We were doing some sampling of sharks and this boat brought a lot of sharks, but they wouldn’t let us touch them because they said, oh, you’re gonna damage my fish. And then we started to talk and then we realized it was that boat that was adrift. And once they learned that it was us, they said, please touch all the fish you want.

Minnie: You can do anything. That’s really amazing. That’s really important though, isn’t it? Like the relationships are the biggest kind of key to successful research in many ways.
So what sort of things were you kind of communicating with them?

Dr Joanna: Yes, it was a trade of information. We wanted to know about turtles or megafauna caught, like whales or manta rays. And they wanted to know from us things that were really useful for fishing, like the wind, the temperature.
Those are really good cues for them to know where the fish could be. So we were basically exchanging information.

Minnie: So, OK, so what are the sort of difficulties, the kind of biggest difficulties you found with implementing these bycatch mitigation measures in the small scale fisheries?

Dr Joanna: Yeah, so one of them is the cost. Who’s going to pay for that? I mean, most of these fishermen are living on the edge. They make the very minimum money. Sometimes there’s no catch.
So who’s going to pay for this technology? Is it going to be the government? Is it going to be the fishermen? Is it going to be some foundation? How is it going to be afforded? That’s one thing. The other thing will be the necessity. It’s regulated.
Is it something that the government is requiring from them? Is it something voluntary? So that is another issue for us. And then also when you think about scaling up, that becomes more tricky because there’s about 20,000 vessels. That means thousands of thousands of equipment. And sometimes you will have to import those things from out of the country. And I mean, it’s basically going into a full business to import those devices.

Minnie: Yeah.It is difficult when a lot of these implementations are down to, like you say, people who are not necessarily making enough money. But I suppose that’s where we hope that government, who are also getting involved with research, may be able to support that and assist that because it is very much no one single person’s problem, I guess. We all need to kind of work together to do that.

So we’ve talked about light. Was there anything else that was significantly helping that you found to reduce the kind of bycatch rate of turtles?

Dr Joanna: Well, our effort has been more on light. We tested briefly, not for turtles, but for mammals, lowering the net to have the surface area free. There’s other research groups that have tried acoustics and apparently didn’t work for turtles. But yes, it did work for dolphins.

Minnie: Is there one net that’s actually particularly like turtles are more at risk from than another?

Dr Joanna: So we have worked mostly on gill nets, but also on long lines.
There’s certainly a difference in the selectivity. Long lines are more selective than gill nets. Gill nets will typically catch everything.

Minnie: I guess, yeah, generally, well, turtles definitely will go for bait on a hook. Then obviously with gill nets, they are just swimming past, I suppose. They’re just kind of accidentally getting stuck as they move through the water column, as opposed to long lines, which they have to actively, I suppose, seek them out and go towards them.

Dr Joanna: Yeah, they will sometimes will bite into the bait or sometimes they’re, I think they’re curious, they get close and then they started getting entangled by the flipper perhaps. And then they become all entwisted.

Minnie: Yeah, it’ll be panicky. So I guess, yeah, I’ve seen a few turtles when I was in the Maldives who had been stuck on long line fishing hooks. Unfortunately, they often do tend to swallow them after a while and then they get stuck in the esophagus. But certainly yeah, not as common as gill nets.

So your career has sort of spanned over the last kind of 25 years of marine conservation. Have you worked with fishermen that whole time? Has that always been a feature of your research?

Dr Joanna: Oh, yeah. So it has changed. I think as a biologist, I wanted to work with animals. I didn’t care for people. But then with time, you realize that all conservation issues are related to people. So that’s when you realize you need to get your best skills to work with people, be ready to deal with that. It’s not easy because you’re not trained for that. You’re trained to measure animals and everything related to that now.
So but it is something that you learn also. I mean, in my case, I’m learning from experience and out of need, really.

Minnie: Yeah, a lot of it actually is a people. It’s all people focused really at the end of the day, whether it’s like trying to alter people’s opinions or understanding of something or engage them in helping you kind of overcome something as, you know, significant as bycatch. How important do you feel it is to involve fishing communities in sea turtle conservation?

Dr Joanna: Oh, without the communities, there’s no reason. There’s no reason for the work we do. But it’s also biologists or researchers cannot be in these communities forever. Whatever we learn or whatever we identified as possibilities to improve fisheries has to be implemented by these communities to ensure sustainability. It has to be adopted and owned by the community and adapted to the way they wanted it to be, to make it feasible and real at the long term.

Minnie: That’s really true. Everything has to be longer term, I guess. Have you seen a shift in the kind of perception the fishery community have towards conservation or sort of any changes over the time that you’ve worked with them?

Dr Joanna: Yeah, I’ve seen changes over time and that’s great, but I still think it’s not fast enough. It should be five times faster if we really want to catch up with what is happening in terms of biodiversity loss and practices that are no longer sustainable.

Minnie: Yes, people are always a little bit slow to change, aren’t they? But do their attitudes feel generally more positive, you feel?

Dr Joanna: I think so. And something that is really new to us is to see also the gender issues, like women participating some more or the youth sometimes participating some more, having an opinion and identifying their role into this conservation issue.
That has been sort of like a new thing for us and we embrace it because it was very organic, which I think is much better.

Minnie: Yeah. Being a woman in conservation and maybe that wasn’t something that was quite so common when you first started working in the field. So you feel like that is maybe changing and we now have a bit more diversity of people also sort of trying to make that change, which is always encouraging.

Dr Joanna: It has changed. I remember when I started work, fishermen would ask me, why are you doing here? You should be at home looking after your children or cooking. And I’m like, I couldn’t even articulate an answer. It was too tiring. But now I see the fishermen wives or fishermen daughters being more interested in conservation, which I think is a very good change for the community as well. There’s big challenges though still because, I mean, in some of these communities, there is a very macho culture. You know, it’s a culture that is very much machista. So it’s very common still to see the women very with an invisible kind of thing. But slowly over time, and I think it can get a little bit more even. And now, of course, we’re aiming to be equals. But that will take some time.

Minnie: But I guess I’m sure you’ve made an impression on many kind of young girls and women, I guess, who may also want to do that. You need to see it to be it, as they say.

Dr Joanna: Yeah, totally. I mean, I have a lot of students that are women, and that is great. My advisors were men at that time. They were great as well. But having an advisor as a woman that can understand your needs as a student or your struggles, that’s really, it can create a very nice atmosphere to work with.

Minnie: Yeah, definitely. Just a little bit more insight into kind of some of those unique difficulties that we all may experience, different intersections. I feel like I have a bazillion more questions that I could ask you there. It’s been super interesting. I’ve really enjoyed learning all about bycatch. It’s a really important aspect of sea turtle conservation.

I think, unfortunately, I’m going to have to sign us off. So yeah thank you so very much for joining us.

Dr Joanna: Of course, thank you Minnie for the invitation. Send me the link whenever you have it ready.

Minnie: Absolutely we will. Thank you so very much Dr Joanna for joining us.

Thank you all to everyone who’s listening. We would love to hear your thoughts. So please do leave us a review and let us know. If you’d like to learn more about sea turtles and the Olive Ridley Project’s work, please visit our website where you can also support it by naming and adopting sea turtles or adopting one of our sea turtle patients. And lastly, you can follow us on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and even TikTok and stay up to date with the world of sea turtles.

So we will see you for our next episode. And until then, I hope you have a turtelly awesome week.