Dear Community,
As many of you might know, our Sea Turtle Protection & Conservation Center (STPCC) has been around since 1983! The workers patrol 3.7 miles of coastline every day, carefully transporting sea turtle eggs to our protected hatching facility where they remain until the time they hatch, and are then immediately released into the ocean.
With each passing year, more and more turtles have come to lay their eggs on the Careyes coast, now summing up to 1.9 million hatchlings! Since 2017, we've organized field trips to the sanctuary with the eleven local elementary schools we partner with, as well as several preschools, middle schools, and even high schools. It has been an unforgettable experience for so many children and a beautiful way to learn about their role in conservation and the protection of our planet!
So far this season (from July 2021 through February 2022), 103,477 baby sea turtles have been safely released into the Pacific Ocean 💖💖 To be more specific: 100,450 Olive Ridley, 1,032 Black, 27 Leatherback, and 1,968 Hawksbill started their journey through the vast and magnificent ocean.
A total of 103 kids and 8 adults from the villages of Agua Caliente Nueva, Agua Caliente Vieja, Juan Gil Preciado, and Miguel Hidalgo Viejo all got a chance to release turtles into the ocean during our trips to the turtle sanctuary on Playa Teopa.
These field trips, along with everything we do in our Environmental Education Program, are designed to inspire the next generation of environmental stewards. With this in mind, we built a wooden theatre and created a puppet show called "La Travesía de Laudy" as a fun and engaging way to generate socio-environmental awareness and knowledge about the sea turtles that nest along our coasts. The story is about a young leatherback turtle who makes a long journey from the Indian Ocean to the coast of Jalisco, along the way meeting different sea turtles and facing various dangers, such as global warming, pollution, and fishing. Through puppet theater, we get children to reflect upon the problems that marine animals experience and understand the importance of saving the turtles.
As always, we would like to thank our biologist Alejandro Peña and the rest of the team at the turtle camp for their amazing labor and for their continuous efforts in teaching both children and adults in our area about the importance of conservation and their role in it!