All we catch are females!

Our project team was recently up on site at Mantanani (NW Borneo) catching juvenile sea turtles again, as part of our work to look at sex ratios in the wild. The problem is, all new turtles we’re finding are females… there’s just so few males left out there. The problem has been ongoing years of hatchery use in the region which have produced entire cohorts of females, year after year. Now that we can prove there’s a problem in the ‘pipeline’ – that 20-30 year maturation period where little is known of what goes on with turtles – we can use the informaiton to change the way hatcheries are operated. Now the hard bit is to get them to listen……