Dr. George Shillinger: Tracking the World's Largest Turtle Across the Pacific

George Shillinger has spent 40 years protecting sea turtles. His path started a pet box turtle that had literally been to space!

I sat down with the Executive Director and Co-Founder of Upwell to talk about what it takes to protect an animal that crosses entire ocean basins, dives over a kilometre deep, and falls under the jurisdiction of dozens of governments.

Here's what struck me most: we've been pouring resources into protecting nesting beaches for decades. But sea turtles spend 99% of their lives at sea. That's where they're dying, from bycatch, ship strikes, pollution, and climate change. George built Upwell to address exactly that gap, using satellite tracking, species distribution models, and partnerships with fishers to protect turtles where it actually matters.

He also makes a compelling case for head-starting and rewilding, two of the most controversial ideas in sea turtle conservation. With Eastern Pacific leatherback populations down as much as 99%, his argument is hard to ignore.
In this conversation we cover:
Capturing and tagging Bumpy, a 1,500-pound leatherback
How spotter planes, acoustic telemetry, and satellite tags track turtles across the Pacific
The Eastern Pacific leatherback collapse: from 185 nesting females to 2 or 3
The Great Turtle Race
The Lost Years: tracking baby turtles with 2-gram satellite tags
Why the old conservation playbook isn't going to cut it

Link in comments. 🐢
#SavingWildlife #Conservation #SeaTurtles #Leatherback #MarineConservation

Transcript

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Anyway, we recaptured Bumpy and it ended up it was just a massive leatherback. It was big then, it was big when it was caught previously, but it had grown another uh several hundred kilos and re surpassed the existing records for largest leatherbacks ever caught by the NOAA team. So this Bumpy weighed in at around 1,500 pounds roughly. I think what is that somewhere north of 500 kilos? Incredible. So it was pretty stunning to see a turtle that big and doing so well. And it was, you know, it was good to see a turtle come back. Reassuring. Reassuring to know that they're still surviving. Welcome to Saving Wildlife. With me, Sam Williams. This is where we get to hear from amazing conservationists about their life and work and all the incredible things they do to save wildlife. George, it's fantastic to be chatting. Um I've long followed your work with leatherbacks, a species that I've still not seen in the wild. Can't wait to. Um, you've been working with these incredible uh beasts, and some of them are huge. You must have memorable encounters uh that you can tell us about. I do. Um, and it's really interesting how I sort of came full circle with leatherbacks because I was my first encounter with a leatherback, because it was quite memorable, was on the is in was in the Delaware Bay area when I was working as an undergrad on a birding project. We were studying migratory shorebirds and trying to understand this connection between shorebirds and horseshoe crabs. And horseshoe crabs lay this huge biomass of eggs along the the coast of New Jersey and the Delaware Bay, and we were banding birds at night and tagging horseshoe crabs with conventional tags. And it was one of these early studies with um Dr. Pete Myers and I befriended a graduate student at UPenn, and he was trying to understand the metabolic efficiency of a horseshoe crab egg and what it meant for these birds and how many they had to eat. And uh at some point along the way I stumbled across the carcass of a leatherback turtle. And at the time I'd I'd never seen anything like it before. I couldn't believe that turtles got that big. And this was a leatherback uh that had been hit by a boat, so that's a huge threat for these turtles, and its carapace was split in half and it was washed up on the beach. And for me, that was a formative moment, but I had no idea. Back then, I was I think I was probably 19 years old, maybe even 18, that uh things would come full circle, and I'd end up doing a career that focused on uh sea turtle conservation with the leatherbacks as one of our sort of most important uh species. Yeah. It's interesting because I've talked to the other conservationists who've had those same formative experiences from something quite negative, and how that has um pushed them into the work because you you you see perfectly in front of you like how dire the situation might be. But have you got a rosier one like that? Much rosier one. So that that that was like my first encounter with a leatherback, and after that, I went on to work with them on nesting beaches in Costa Rica and tagged 46 of them out of Valladolid, Costa Rica, with uh satellite tags watching their documenting their movements across the Pacific. And um, and that was always special to see a leatherback on the nesting beach. A female, a big female leatherback is really inspiring. She's giving birth and contributing to the population, and every turtle that comes up on the beach is a blessing. So, but I hadn't seen uh turtles swimming in the open ocean until I started working with the NOAA team here off California. Right. And we went out to start doing satellite tagging and western Pacific leatherbacks using planes, spotter planes, and a vessel capture a capture vessel, and got to handle several turtles that were wild caught on the forging habitats, but I'd never been in the water with a leatherback until um last year when we stumbled across one while we were releasing loggerhead turtles off the coast of Sedwana Bay, off Sedwana Bay in South Africa. And we had a film crew in the water, and I was standing with my uh phone trying to document the release of the last loggerhead, and uh my colleague um released it. Her husband was the videographer, and she jumped in the water with him to watch it swim away when all of a sudden uh a big uh female leatherback just popped up right next to them. And I I was stuck with this uh situation where I had to decide whether or not I wanted to jump in the water too and see this leatherback because I did have my mask and snorkel and fens, or film it and have that, you know, for to share with the you know with the team from South Africa. So I opted to do the ladder and sat on the boat, filming it, wishing that I was in the water. But in the end, we got amazing footage from the videographer, and the turtle came back and uh found the team again, so it made two passes because it seemed almost curious about what was going on. And that was absolutely stunning. So that to have that uh that opportunity was incredible. And then there was one other uh incident that happened which was amazing. And when I was w out working off the coast here with the NOAA crew, we encountered a turtle named Bumpy for it was a recapture. So this was a turtle that had initially been captured several years prior and had was given the name Bumpy because it had a deformation in its carapace from a ship strike that had healed, but it left a big bump in the carapace of Bumpy. So um anyway, we recaptured Bumpy and it ended up it was just a massive leatherback. It was big then, it was big when it was caught previously, but it had grown another uh several hundred kilos and re surpassed the existing records for largest leatherbacks ever caught by the NOAA team. So this Bumpy weighed in at around 1,500 pounds roughly. I think what is that somewhere north of 500 kilos? Um incredible. So it was but it was pretty stunning to see a turtle that big and doing so well, and it was you know, it was good to see a turtle come back. Reassuring. Reassuring to know that they're still surviving. And so I'm the mechanical part of my brain is thinking about the the how does that work? How do you get an animal that big on a boat? Have you got special equipment? Is it and then how do you get them off the boat? Right. How do you weigh them? How does that all work? It's a super involved process, and we're the team's refining it all the time. So it's that we've sort of it's very bespoke. And it's just kind of over the years incrementally improved and improved with little refinements and new technologies. So the way it's done typically is there'll be a spotter plane with several observers, and they're and they're doing surveys, line transects for turtles. But when they spot one, and all that data is being recorded, and along with data about marine mammals, they must see whales sharks and yeah, whales, penipeds, um, even molas, because they're a good proxy species for sunfish? Yeah, okay. Giant disc of the giant disc, and they're they're what we call jellyvores. They they predate on gelatinous uh zooplankton. Okay. So it's the same diet essentially of a of a leatherback, so they're often seen together. Right, okay. And so a a jellyfish can be described as a gelatinous zooplankton? Yes. Is that okay, right? Okay, just give me terms. These are all new to me because it's marine and it's a totally different environment for me. Um but I love the idea of uh that they are found in the same places as the turtles. So that are they competitors then? Uh well the turtles are their are there, they're so turtle, like all sea turtles are sort of um ecological niche, they have their have kind of carved out their own ecological niches, and it's often linked to the their prey. And so for leatherbacks, it's it's gelatinous zooplankton. Right. For green turtles, it's seagrasses. For loggerheads, it's sort of you know benthic stuff, uh, you know, clams, crabs. Okay. Um for hawkspills, it's coral reefs and sponges. Um so but out here off California, there the turtles are coming, the leatherbacks are coming here to feed on um zooplankton, which is gelatinous zooplankton, which is fairly abundant along the coast during post-upwelling periods. So we have a lot of winds come through, surface waters get moved, uh nutrients come up from the bottom of the you know the sea, the seafloor, yeah, and they're fertilized, they've, you know, for the at the surface by sunlight, and they grow like crazy, and a lot of um predators are drawn to these areas. The whole food web comes in to eat. Right. And so here in the California Current, we have a really strong upwelling system during certain times of the year, and that's when we time our leatherback work. And that, by the way, was the origin for our name Upwell. Upwell, right. We were when we founded Upwell, um, you know, the the concept of upwelling and the the importance of upwelling kind of really resonated with the you know what leatherbacks do in the open ocean, which is find these areas where there's patchly distributed ephemeral prey. Right. But they're often around front like ocean fronts or convergence zones or along areas where upwelling uh traditionally occurs. And these are these are fleeting periods of the year, but they're somewhat predictable. And we've started to kind of use that those environmental covariates associated with upwelling systems as ways to predict when leatherbacks are likely to be in the area. You had asked me though about the the uh the capture. Uh it's fascinating. It's a real team operation, so we have to kind of anticipate when the turtles will be here and then hope that because everyone's got busy schedules and we kind of get half people have to commit to a date. We never know for sure if they're gonna be here, but we try to target that a great window in advance, and then we hire an aviation provider. Right. And uh we're a special plane. Like the bulbous window so they can actually see down because in a plane you don't tend to look down, right? Yeah, so that that's right. So we use a twin-engine high fixed-wing aircraft where you can see, you know, kind of past the the landing gear. So you don't have you're not you have nothing to hopefully impede your view. And then we also have a belly window in some of these planes where we can have an observer lying on their belly and staring down. Oh wow. We've got multiple eyes on the water and a whole process where some one person is taking data and three other people are looking for turtles, and then we have to, of course, account for you know the angle um of inclination or the sorry, the angle of viewing angle from where we are on the plane. Yeah, to calculate distance and where it is. Wow. And the that we have a strip kind of below the plane that we follow, and then distance going out from the with as you move away from that strip, there's greater likelihood of um of error. Right, okay. Uh so but that so anyway, the plane's up there doing the transects. We're in the boat below, and we have a real the boat's called the Sheila B, and it's a it's a leatherback capture machine, and it's got a bow door that's especially designed so it that drops. Yeah. So and we that we can use the hydraulics of the boat and the bow door to bring the turtle into the boat once it's been caught. But we on the bow spirit, we have usually two uh crew members. One of them's holding a 13-foot pole with a big hoop net on it, and the net's attached with little clips, so it breaks away. It's a breakaway net. Um, and once the the plane spots the turtle, the uh the we're we're alerted, the captain of the boat's alerted, and we go into a chase mode. Right. So we approach the turtle slowly as it's sitting on the surface when it comes up to take a breath, and then we're lucky uh we can get close enough that we can get a shot at trying to catch it with the hoop net. And that involves uh one of the two guys on the bows holding the net, reaching way out, and then dropping the net as the turtle's moving forward um near the boat. You your team have been great and shared some video of that. So we'll put video into the into the YouTube uh version. Of course, audio, uh, you'll have to go to YouTube and see it there if you're listening on audio. Um but what strikes me there is yeah, it's great if this the turtle stays on the surface, but they can they work, they live in a three-dimensional space and they could just dive down and get so that must be really tricky to catch them, isn't it? They they yeah, and they do that all the time. So we're we're constantly sometimes these chases can last for quite a while. And it's so that's why it's so nice to have the plane. So the turtle dives, the plane kind of does a circle. Yeah, we know it's gonna come up sooner or later, and they eventually respond it, and then off we go again. We're and chasing it again until we finally get that net over it, and then we have another person who's standing back by the by the wheelhouse with a rope that's attached to the bag. They pull the rope off the clips or the bag off the clips. Uh the turtle's now in you know, enveloped in the in the net, and then we pull it around. Everybody's all hands on deck. We bring the turtle over to a side door, and then we have another uh crew member who lies down on the ground prone and ties uh a rope basically around the turtle turtle's shoulders. Yeah. And then a little and sensors it into a knot that we can then bring back around to the bow and hook the capstan up to and use the hydraulics of the boat to bring the turtle in along with all of us pulling. Right. And then we've then the most recent innovation we've done is we added a cattle, uh basically a scale that's used to weigh cattle into the floor of into the deck. So every every season we take the boat out for this purpose, it gets um outfitted with a you know a deck that's safe for the turtle and that'll minimize abrasion and friction and then um this the scale. And then we have a little Bluetooth uh device that we can check in with the scale and get the automatic weight. Wow. So if you're not careful on the boat and you don't want to be weighed, you can be caught um off guard standing on the scale. Yeah. Yeah. So we get a weight and then we use that information to assess body condition and growth and kind of um and often we'll see when we we get out, we usually get turtles that are fresh, have just arrived. And so they're they're still, you know, some of them are really fat, but others are just in the process of starting to put on weight. Just arrived from being out in the plagic ocean somewhere. Right. Right. Good question. So these turtles are are coming from the uh nesting beaches in the far west Pacific. Okay. Uh and they are they're linked to a a mid-year uh, or we'd say summer in the United States, but a mid-year nesting population. And they're in the in the Solomon Islands and in Indonesia, there are several beaches that have two different populations. Um, same, they're all they're all West Pacific leatherbacks, but they're different nesting subpopulations. And during the winter, the turtles go south towards Australia and New Zealand. And during the summer, the turtles go, they well, they'll go into the Coral Sea, but some of them, up to 50% or more, will go up into the North Pacific transition zone and then cut across the Pacific Ocean all the way to uh the United States. Some will linger off Hawaii for a while and may not go all the way to the US, but we'll often get some, we'll often get turtles that will go all the way to California. So is this an annual cycle, an almost annual migration that they're doing? They're going Solomon Islands, Indonesia down to Australia and then up to the states. No, two different so some are going down to the Australia, Australasia, and some are coming up to the is it the there's so much here. I'm saying I love this. And the the I've seen a stat that the Eastern Pacific, I guess, subpopulation, they they've reduced by 97%. Yeah, so maybe even over that. In the last 30 years, their population's declined by over 90%. Certainly, like we've we estimate like maybe even as high as 99%. Wow. Okay, we'll come back to that and the threats facing them and things. But I'm I'm curious, they're ectothermic? Uh because they're not. They're ectotherms, but we call them facultative endotherms. Okay. Because they hardly have several properties that that are or several attributes that make them unique and almost like quasi-warm-blooded, although they're not, but they're probably the closest reptile to a mammal. So, so just so in a regular reptile like an iguana, they're dependent on the environment than sitting in the sun to get warm. Um, I'm just I'm thinking back because I just spoke with um Jen Miller from WCN, who was working with sea otters, and I was amazed to learn that they keep themselves warm by metabolism. They're just burning so much energy. And of course, that's different to whales, which keep themselves warm with blubber. So this is something different. It's a combination. They don't have blubber, do they? No, but they have brown, they have brown adipose tissue, and they kind of burn, and that when that burns, it generates heat. So they can create heat for exercise, but not the same way mammals do. Okay. Um, and they are they also have uh what high thermal inertia, so they're they have a their mass is very big relative to their body size, so they're or their their width and length, so they're really thick. Right, okay. They're slow to um lose heat, slow to shed heat, but and slow to gain heat. But that kind of works to their advantage on long dives where they slowly get cool. Yeah. And then they come to the surface and they might bass for a well and and then head back down. Okay. Um, so that's and that's that's they also have a a lot of a lot of uh a lot of this brand adipose tissue and a lot of fat, which helps them. And so they it's a combination of behavioral adjustments and physiology and unique mechanisms for you know for dealing with oxygen storage that other turtles don't have. They have countercurrent heat exchangers and like sort of like a where the warm blood coming from the heart is cooled by it well, warms the cold blood in the extremities, and vice versa. So the you have a all these features that have kind of make the the turtle really unique, the leatherback turtle are really unique in the reptile world, and especially in the turtle world. There are no other turtles that can forage in waters as cold as the leatherback or that move into realms that are as as far north or south. And the and deep as well. How deep do they I'm kind of curious about the trivia, like how deep do they? Yeah, well, recently there was a dive of I think 1,340 meters recorded. Wow. And then some turtles. It's more than a kilomet than one 1.3 kilometers. 1.3 kilometers deep. And the deepest one that I've seen from our tracks was about 1,210 meters. And and that must have that's phenomenal pressure as well. Yeah. That they're then adapted to handling. And and the the adjustment in pressure, uh thinking of like scuba diving, how much work that is. That's another mystery as to how they do that and why they do that and uh why they dive so deep. Right. But I mean you can imagine when they're diving like that, they have this pliable carapace. Yeah, exactly. Unlike the heart. It's not a super hard shell, is it? We call them soft shell turtles, but it's they're not exactly soft either. But they're their carapace is made of these he hexagonal bones. It's sort of a matrix of bones that can kind of compress. So as they dive, you you could imagine they kind of get somewhat cigar-shaped, I would think, at at depth. Um and so they're kind of you know basically get compressed and then expand again as they ascend. Amazing. Um and they their dives can last, you know, well over an hour on these really long dives. But we've tried to a lot of teams have been exploring the the nature of these really deep dives and why they do it. And there are different theories. One could maybe predator avoidance, but you you need to see a really fast um descent. And often these are long sort of slow dives. Another theory is orientation, they're looking for uh for crustal anomalies in the seafloor, but some of the places where they do these dives, the seafloor is so deep, it seems questionable that they'd actually pick up much, even getting a a kilometer closer. And then another one might simply just be predation, so they're looking for prey, and then they can scan the water column as they ascend and look for jelly for you know j jellyfish and zooplankton in that contrast with light coming out of the room. They are hunting with visual. It's better it's they're they're visual predators. And they're saying also have you know chemical sense, they can smell olfactor good olfactory sense as well, so chemosensory perceptions. Well, at least we think there's a link there with like natal homing and finding nesting beaches. Um so but it yeah, they're but they're certainly visual predators. Yeah, interesting. Upwell is focused on all turtles, I believe. Um, but with is it there is a focus on leatherbacks in particular, or how would you describe the the relative uh attention that you give to different turtles? So we to try to be uh fair, um but I am biased. You don't have a favorite, but you do. But I we don't have a favorite, but we do, this guy. Um just because I my uh the the inspiration for creating Upwell was driven in part by the plight of Eastern Pacific leatherbacks, where um you know we I'd been working on a project for many years when I did my started my PhD down in at Play Grande, Costa Rica in 2002, there were about 185 nesting females um at the nesting beach, and every year there were fewer and fewer. Maybe it was 175, but anyway, the the numbers fell precipitously over the last uh 15 years, and um we're down to like two to three turtles or less per season now. But it was it was an incredible uh drop-off. And that sort of promulgated the realization that um you know nesting beach conservation alone wasn't enough, nor and the the goals of trying to achieve bike catch reduction, which is the kind of the biggest driver of decline, we think, for leatherbacks, and at least this population um is is an incredibly uh Herculean and Sissiphian task right now with so many these animals move so far and wide that and this is like the tracking data revealed to us that they're scattered across the Pacific and they travel tremendous distances, thousands and thousands of kilometers away from their their nesting beach. And that's where they spend 99% of their lives. In fact, for males, then their entire lives. Right. And the the pressures are just great out there. And if we can't get countries to agree to bycatch reductions, and that's extremely hard. We can't get observer coverage on other fleets, we don't know how many turtles are being killed. Um there are a lot of bad actors. Uh there's a lot of on the high seas, there's no law whatsoever, and these turtles love the high seas. So uh, you know, boats, vessels are acting with impunity. And in a perfect world, it would be great to say, we'll just reduce bycatch and the problem's gonna be solved. We'll keep protecting the nesting beaches, reduce bycatch, and voila, we're gonna have turtles. But it's not that simple. So there are um that's a you know, it's and it's not just of course bycatch too, it's you know, competitive. Compounded by the cumulative impacts of plastic pollution and pollution more broadly. You know, entanglement in plastics is an issue as well, like floating ghost nets and that kind of thing. And ship strikes, Russell strikes, and then, you know, climate change is a whole nother thing unto itself, but that's leading to shifts and range, uh, distribute of the distribution and range of these turtles and in their prey and in and and in fishing effort. So are you seeing um that leatherbacks are going even further north or and and and south? Or how's it how's it affect them? It's hard to it's hard to say at this point. Um our models suggest that they would be uh eventually shifting into habitats that were were previously, you know, weren't where they didn't have occur in as high density. So we might see more more in, for example, on the U.S. West Coast, turtles might be put could push further north north in numbers into British Columbia or even into Alaskan waters, where they have been sighted many times over the years, but um maybe more frequently just because the you're gonna see changes in the abundance and distribution of their prey and water temperatures that are more favorable for prey. And so leatherbacks, even though they do exhibit great fidelity to nesting beaches and to areas of to foraging sites and to migration pathways, they're I think quite capable of shifting their behaviors if necessary. Um you mentioned your PhD. I'm aware you've been involved in conservation for uh I think 40 years now, which when we say these kinds of things, I always find it shocking. Um walk us through that journey of how you got um what led you and what what brought about the shift from the research to uh running a nonprofit. Great. Well, um long and mining story, but I'll try to probably get into the details and all of that. But I I grew up in Southern California. Um I always loved uh nature and I loved uh reading and adventure, and I would read all these great adventure stories by some of the, you know, the Hemingway and Kipling, and um, and I loved for some crazy reason birds and primates. Um and so I was, you know, I had would study birds and collect feathers and draw birds and um and always and read all these great books by uh you know by Jane Goodall. She was a big hero of mine as a kid, and I liked Louis Leakey as well and um paleontology and primates and human history. And um anyway, had no shortage of of wild animals that were in various stages of rehab as a kid. I'd like to think anyway, that I was saving frogs and and uh salamanders and turtles. We had a box turtle that my father uh worked for NASA, and and this was one of the it was used as one of the early animal models that was sent into space to tap during biosatellites. So we had this pet turtle. This turtle had a little box turtle. Yeah, it had gone up and into space and came down in a in a capsule, and uh, it ended up in our yard as a pet because my father was working on all these early um early Apollo 11 stuff at NASA. And so he would take me to go visit the campus and burrowing owls all over the campus there. So my father loved birds as well, and he would we'd go out birding and looking for burrowing owls, and then we'd go visit the primates that were off poor primates that were like our animal models for humans, right? You know, before we send humans up, we have to check it out and see if it's safe on animals. But I had Macs anyway. Little did I know that I'd end up working with turtles, but they had this little box turtle that has just this crazy story. Uh, it was a turtle world's first turtleneau. I did learn later that the Russians were sending turtles into space too, but there were a lot of crazy questions. You said turtleneut. Yeah, you said turtleneut. It's it I it it's I mean, I think back on that, and I wish we'd kept Max when we moved to San Diego. Max was like the best show and tell you know, we'd as kids you bring in something in at to class to share with everyone, and I'd always bring Max and uh there's there, the the team at NASA was looking at how you know shell growth changes in zero G and things like that. I I sort of followed this pathway where I was just um always kind of enamored with the with you know the sort of the wild kingdom and nature and romanticized adventure and working as like a field biologist. We used to watch Wild Kingdom, Mutual Voma's Wild Kingdom, and and all these read all these books and stories. And living in San Diego, uh we it was a big fishing community. So I um I did enjoy uh being on the ocean and I would go sport fishing as well and and participate in that. And I met uh a captain who owned a commercial vessel and he had uh multiple permits. He would he would do jigging for albacore and and tuna uh off the waters of you know, out further out in the Pacific, off Mexico and up along the California coast. And uh he would do gill netting for uh swordfish and thresher sharks. And his three daughters were students at my high school and uh middle school. And they I asked, I approached them one day and asked them if their if their dad would be willing to let me uh join him for a summer to work on the fishing boat with not knowing full well, you know, fully what I was getting myself into. Yeah. And that was uh very uh it's sort of an epiphany for me because uh we went out there and the work was incredibly difficult. And we were putting, you know, setting the nets at dusk, and we had to have the nets in by dawn so that that uh we wouldn't get excited. All the nets had to be pulled in by dawn. Uh and there were there was a boat out there in our code group of boats that um it hooked it entangled with a blue whale. Oh wow, and lost they lost all of their nets, and it you know, nearly it was just a disaster, and that would happen from time to time, and then we'd bring in our catch, and it was if the net would be filled with uh sharks and molas. We we were targeting the thresher sharks, so we would keep those. They they had a the market value at the time was maybe three dollars a pound or something like that, four dollars a pound. And I was make working for six percent of the gross. So for me, I was gonna get home get some summer earnings and then maybe go back and try and buy my first car. But for my skipper, it was his whole livelihood. Right. He was trying to get braces for his orthodontics for his orthodontist for his three daughters. And it was kind of hand to mouth, feast or famine. And you so you needed to really, you know, get well, the the going's good and try and capture as much food as possible, or for sorry, as many fish as possible, and and then get in, sell them. We'd stop at different ports along the west coast and drop off the fish and then move on and go back out again. So we did that through the summer. And I, you know, starting with the the jig fishing and then transitioning to the gill knitts later in the season. But it was the gill knitting that really caught my attention because it wasn't selective the way the jigging was. The jig boats we were pretty much catching exclusively albacore. We'd like to jig is a lure, a line with a lure, and they're set at varying lengths, and then we run them out behind the boat on a hydraulic press. Okay. And you engage the press when the fish start biting the jigs, and you pull them in as quickly as you can, one after another, and throw the line back out, put another one out, and the fish bounces down the chute, but lands on the deck and starts vomiting and blood and dies, and then uh flipping all over, and then you stack it in the hold, and that was you do it all over again. Right. Then the day is filled with like hard work, and then it's cleaning the decks and then stacking the fish, and then wheel watch, right? Cooking the dinner, um, preparing everything, making sure everything's spick, spick and span. And then you're up at 3 a.m. to make sure we don't collide with any vessels and everything's you know safe. Right. And it was non-stop. So I saw how hard uh he worked. Yeah. And for me that was really inspirational because at the same time I was watching, and I was making, you know, my six percent of the gross after we removed all my food costs and everything else, which was a pittance. Right. But the sharks would come in, and this is what really killed me. These these are threshold sharks. We were targeting thrushers, but we also caught a ton of blue sharks. Okay. And other sharks. Uh, but the blue sharks in particular were considered trash fish. So they would come up and they'd be thrown on the deck, and we wouldn't put them back in the water because they'd swim back into the net. And every time a s a shark got in the net, we had to pick it out of the net, which consumed time. Okay. And the longer that took, the greater the likelihood of more sharks coming. And when they would come into the nets, they were coming after the fish that were in the nets. Right, right. And then they would start to bite those fish and devalue them. Devalue them to the point where some of the fish you just couldn't sell anymore. So it was a constant. So you I you could see these fishermen engaged in a battle with the their prey. You know, they're just like these stupid sharks. They're they're coming in and ruining my catch. Right. And so the last thing they wanted to do was throw them back. And I mean, we'd see we'd have sharks come up and they were pregnant, big, beautiful blue sharks that you just, you know, terrible to see that kind of waste. And the molas as well would come up, but those we'd put back and they'd just hell on. I mean, so well, first of all, can you describe a gill net? How what is that just like a giant funnel behind the boat? Or is it like a these were drifting nets that had buoys and they were both and it's strung down to a certain depth, it just hangs below the you know the top the surface and captures anything that happens to be swimming in the you know the upper section of the water column through those areas. So the fishermen would target areas that were productive or known to harbor high densities of of target species, and then they would string out their gillnets and then they drift overnight and they'd have beacons on them. So the boat would would stay fairly close by. Okay. So they're not d directly attached to the boat. They're independent. Yeah. Okay. And so it's just this line of net that's flowing through the surface waters and picks stuff up. Yeah. And then you just haul it in. It's indiscriminate. Right. Yeah, okay. So that yeah. Then you can catch turtles as well as the biggest. Yeah, so they've been banned off the US West Coast because for in part for that reason and also for marine mammals. And so, you know, there are a lot of alternative gear types that are being developed. Um, but you know, the swordfish are like, for example, they've the swordfish fishery has has pretty much shut down off the US West Coast, with the exception of um very selective approaches like harpoon fishery, you know, harpoon fishing, which requires um skill. Yeah. You need a plane, a spotter plane to find the the the heart the you know the swordfish. And it's like a high investment for what could be a fairly low return. So the way that might mechanism might work is if you have um consumers that are willing to ask where their seafood, how they how that you know, fish arrived at their table. Was it sustainably caught? How was it caught? And then you need traceability, but you need willingness, and that in the US market that's a bit undermined because of the presence of foreign-caught swordfish from fleets that have absolute act with impunity and have no rules or regulations. So well, we have very well-monitored fleets in California. Uh you can go to Trader Joe's and buy Chinese caught swordfish for you know $7 a pound, and it sits alongside sustainably, you know, caught swordfish at $25 a pound. Right. Yeah. You know, if it most people are price sensitive. Yeah, sure. So it's it's a it's a very difficult battle, and you know, it could probably be partially won through improved trade mechanisms of some sort. But um in the meantime, there's been a a swordfish stock that's sitting off the US West Coast that hasn't been fully uh well exploited in decades. So you have a lot of fishermen who are watching this thinking, I you know, make this work. So there so there's an argument for using more selective techniques like deep set buoy gear or other things that avoid a lot of that by catch you get at the surface and that are more likely to, you know, interrupt, just catch capture just swordfish, the target species. I I had no idea that nets were just left to to go. Um that's kind of that's kind of crazy. That that chapter of your life, that was before getting into research and academia? Yeah, well, sort of. I mean, I was uh I was doing I also was interested in veterinary medicine, so I took a class at the San Diego Zoo in high school that was fantastic. They just it was for like six students that showed an interest from across the the school district, and I was lucky enough to get in and we were working with zoo vets on different whatever died in the zoo that day. We would necropsy it, we would get you know work with the specialist and of all different taxa. Um and that was a full semester and that and I did science fair ever, you know, every year as a kid, and um, you know, was I guess a bit um well maybe geeky. I don't know. I you know enjoyed enjoyed doing that, and um uh that was that was always fun for me. And and I always my dad was such an inspiration in that space. Um who would built a centrifuge and we're looking at the if effects of increased gravitation on in in a homemade centrifuge on fruit flies and other things. Wow. Just kind of funky. So I was always interested in the science and the but the I also enjoyed the ocean and the that this situation with the fishermen really gave me first hand exposure I in many ways, though, to the realities of conservation. I guess that's the you know what in in seeing how hard uh the skipper worked to support his family and how much work was involved. And it wasn't he wasn't out there because he was out to get something or to injure sharks or anything. It was like is there has to be a better way to, and that's what conservation's about, I think. It's balancing like uh it you have to consider livelihoods. And if you're if if you you're gonna try to take away someone's income or their rights to, you know, to to harvest something, you I need something to replace the alternative. Yeah, you need an alternative. Um so uh, you know, that's the the challenge in conservation is always rec reconciling kind of human needs and coming up with create creative solutions to do that where you create win-wins. And one path with turtles and in this in this case would be like can we can we uh you know, by creating a more selectively harvested seafood, could could we can we ask for a higher price? Um but it's you know life's full of trade-offs and this is an ongoing one. Um but that sort of was my first epiphany about the realities of you know, kind of my my the bubble I had of the romantic kind of notion of commercial fishing just kind of vanished with that um experience. Like this is this is really hard work. I don't think that's you know, I and I felt terrible about how many sharks we we you know we killed. Sure. Um fortunately most of the molas all got away. We we'd pull let them go and they'd some of those can be like 10 feet tall, kind of 10, 12 feet, and they take time to get off the out of the net, and then we'd have to kind of haul them over to the side and they're very heavy. Yeah. Um and that but they the thing is I don't I think maybe the reason molas were sort of off the hook uh with fishermen was is they consider them really dumb and they're like, you know, but they're not taking you know $100 bites out of my you know my market fish. It's interesting because um a lot of fruit farmers uh hate parrots that are crop pests kind of and um but the thing they hate is the parrots will go along and taste a fruit and then just throw it away and then taste another one. And they're so wasteful. I hate I hate that uh that you know I I I can see where the farmer I we have we have apples in our backyard. Crows will come and peck. If they just took one, they just put a holes in the floor. Yeah, they just took one, but they'll pick a few bites and then move on, and I'll find these these ruined uh fruits on the ground with holes in them. Yeah. Uh well you can see how the the yeah, the fishermen can can see that challenge with with sharks. I'm curious about the arc of your career. I've got a PhD at Stanford, but you've also got an MBA, which I find very interesting because running an organization is so much more than just the science. What motivated you to get the MBA? Yes, it was really just kind of got the just the life for me has been sort of the circuitous path where I've just sort of gone from one experience to the next, seeking more experience and kind of building on the last one, sort of levering off of it, finding great mentors. Uh, been fortunate enough to have some really great mentors along the way, and then kind of embracing each opportunity as a learning experience with the with the idea that eventually all this knowledge would transform into something substantive. So I did a string of um, I went on, did a uh an undergraduate degree at the University of Pennsylvania. It was, I was targeting medical school or vet school, and then I got uh, but I still had this conservation um desire, and I started doing uh a string of uh through the summers of field internships, working on uh shorebirds and horseshoe crab shorebirds and horseshoe crabs in the Delaware Bay and looking at their interaction with that bolus of eggs that are laid by horseshoe crabs and that really critical. It's a bottleneck for these migrating shorebirds who are traveling vast distances from the south to arc breeding grounds in the Arctic and rely on this influx of protein. Um, and that was a conservation challenge in its own right with habitat loss on the U.S. East coast. But that was a fascinating experience, and then jumping from there to um spending uh a summer and working in Costa Rica. I had we had a scientist at Penn, um, Dr. Dan Jansen, who's well known in dry forest ecology, and he taught a class. And I, you know, one of the best classes I took at Penn was his field ecology course and went to Costa Rica with him to Santa Rosa, yeah, right. And saw all the kind of the work he was doing to restore these like these imperiled dry dry forest ecosystems in in that region. Um and he was just such a clever uh researcher. I mean, he found Phil is, I mean, but just very inspiring. So I had um just did every summer I would make a point of of doing another exciting field internship rather than just coming coming home and hanging out. I wanted to uh to go do something and learn. And then I had my first uh job out of out of uh out of college was uh kind of looking for internships around the Washington, DC or area where a lot of the major international conservation organizations were based. And I had to choose at ultimately between the World Bank, where I had uh an opportunity to be an intern working on Lexis Nexus and aggregating data in the Africa program. Okay, uh, or the World Wildlife Fund. And I remember showing up at the World Bank and everyone was wearing like really nice suits and ties and walking in, and I was like, this isn't that this isn't gonna work for me. And it was, you know, it's like a hundred degrees outside, and everyone's wearing a suit and roasting, and you just not your habitat. Not my habitat. So walk into WWF and they're playing soccer outside, and everyone's biking in, and you know, it just uh looked so much more my style. But my first day of work at C at WWF was the last day for several people that I was really inspired by. It was uh Russ Mittermeyer was leaving to um to take over as president of Conservation International. There were a string of other long-term uh WWF employees who had were transitioning over to CI. There'd been a change in leadership at WWF, so it was kind of a very interesting moment in time. But I had a great experience at WWF and started meeting some amazing mentors who then kind of catapulted me into one internship after another. So then I went to work with Rare through a very close friend who was uh connected with in the forestry program at WWF, who pointed me to George Powell or to um um Paul Butler. Paul Butler, yeah. So, you know, that led to like running around in a parrot suit with Paul and the Bahamas and yeah, and Abaco and Nagua and going to churches and proselytizing about conservation, which was great. Yeah, and that that was another adventure, and then working in Costa Rica with George Powell on Quetzals and radio callers, calling them and following them all over the place up and down. Altitude no migrants. Altitude no migrants. I remember I started to grow fond of this pair that um had been what we've been watching for quite a while, and we would catch them to cut you know with a big pole, kind of like what we use for turtles, but a lot smaller, you know, I put it over the nest cavity and they'd come out and boom, we'd bring them down and cover their eyes and put a collar on them. Right. But I remember these these two chicks fledged, and one of them kind of was a little warier than the other. And I was sitting in the back in the you know, in the brush watching watching this happen, and um George was further up the hill, and uh these two brown crows, jays, brown jays came out of the out of nowhere. Just as this chick was fledging, and and the the chick, one of them came at the chick, and you've you've seen these jays, they're you know, they're it's just little buggers. And uh the chick got hit by the jay and floundered for a moment and then dropped too fast, you know, wasn't quite ready to make the jump and fell to the ground. And the jays just descended on it. And I was like, oh my god, I dropped my stuff and raced down there to George is like, stop. What are you doing? What are you doing? Stop. I was like, I can't see this. But um, he called me off, and that poor little guy was lost. Uh yeah. But I realized, you know, that again, you know, you have to let nature take its course in these situations, and that's data. Yeah. And that was a rough one, but it's it's the nature of it all. And and and then uh I did anyway, I did a string of other uh you know, internships with the Nature Conservancy in California. I that was another really interesting one focusing on plants in the in the state of California. And um I think it was just so many of the big NGOs, uh two or three others, and then finally uh landed at the International Council for Well, I had a friend who was running the Western Hemisphere Shoreboard Reserve Network, and he uh introduced me to an opportunity with the International Council for Bird Preservation, which Right. When you've been on Birds on the East Coast, Birds Again, how did you make the jump from birds to turtles? Well, so uh yeah, well let I'll tell you that. Um I should get to the because your question about this arc was the main it's great. Uh well, because that because uh watching all of these organizations, I started to get insights into how they ran. And some were more effective, I thought, than others, but no names. I mean, it's just it's just the way it worked. And I noticed some back then, like uh you would you'd have organizations that were run by you know b business development or legal types, and they were very pretty secure financially, which is always very important in an organization and and well managed, but there was often I'd often observe schisms between the development staff and the program staff. And the program staff were often you know scientists or people with a technical background who were really focused on the mission and vision of the organization and on the principles of the organization and on adherence to kind of you know the the rigor that um through which you know in decision making about science and conservation priority setting. And there's always and there and I think those organizations that were run by the business development legal types did well with money, but often suffered from mission drifts because there's always something that's just a little sexier maybe than what you're doing um somewhere that can, you know, it's distracting and it's a bright, shiny object, and it brings in funding. It can bring in the money funding. Yeah. And for this, for the scientists or the the people who were more um uh you know who were more uh who adhered more rigidly to the values of the organization, they struggled uh to find resources because they were too locked in to that, you know. So there was a ha there was a balance that had to be kind of struck. And so what for me kind of the the thinking was I if I really want to move on in the conservation space, it would be good to be equipped with skills and business policy, but also to have that scientific grounding so that I can relate to the the researchers and the program team and understand our mission and vision and speak to it directly. Yeah, so that is for me kind of led me to think about and I had a lot of friends at the time who were had gone to Yale School Forestry. There were a bunch of them and Peace Corps volunteers and others in Washington, D.C. And um Yale was known for also having a business uh degree that also had a strong public sector management component to it. So I thought, well, this is a great chance to go to the school of forestry and combine it with the school of management's degree. It was called an MPPM at the time, and now it's an MBA. Um you had that option to choose whichever one you wanted, and now it's just a MBA. But um but Yale's reputation was around public sector management and and finance, the other half. But I uh so I applied there, but I'd been lucky enough too to encounter another mentor who was involved with ICBP's Pan American Continental Section, and I should say ICBP is now Bird Life International. They went through a major overhaul and a rebranding while I was there, and that was a really serendipitous experience for me because I was hired to kind of galvanize the network, identify the strategy for the Americas, working with a team based out of Cambridge, and then we had another officer, program officer in um Ecuador, and together we were kind of trying to rebuild the Latin American and North American continental section into a new model with partner organizations in each country. So we'd traveled all over Latin America doing incredible birding. I saw birds that were never, I mean, the the the the British, they were mostly you know Brits that would do this with, and they were incredible birders. So they would go out until uh three in the morning, and then I'd we'd get to bed, and at 4 30 there'd be a knock on my door saying, get up, we're leaving. What? We're gonna go find the noble snipe. Get up. Noble snipe. Brilliant. And uh like, oh my god, driving up through, you know, and I mean I know when we get back from our noble snipe hunt, we're gonna be in meetings for the next eight hours, and then we're gonna be up again until 2 a.m. or 3 a.m. And then we're gonna be up again. And it's that's the way it was a vicious cycle. They were in like we had a guy who one of the Africa um John Fanshaw, you may know him. I know the name. Yeah, John was one of the set the record for most birds um spotted in a single day. I mean, he was using helicopter, they were using helicopters and planes and cars in Africa. It was somewhere in East Africa, but I think it was north of like high threes, maybe 400 species in a day. Wow. Um, you know, it's a you know quite an honor to these guys were crack birders. I mean, I was such a neophyte, but but it was a lot of fun to be in the field with them, and I really enjoyed that those days. But I ultimately uh leveraged that opportunity to pursue graduate school, and I applied both to a joint degree and to uh Stanford for a master's at the time, and my advisor, who was Don Kennedy, then the former president of Stanford, and he was editor-in-chief of AAAS at the time, was super encouraging and took me in as an integrated interdisciplinary um I did ecology and and um evolutionary biology, but he let me kind of put together a really creative master's. Right. And uh in this case, I was uh I was working with another student to look at um effects of wind energy on birds of prey and the application of GIS to identify areas of risk for for raptors. At some point in your graduate career, you did the the great turtle race. Can you tell us about that? Yeah, yeah. So after all that, yeah, I um you know I went well, I went on to business school uh at Yale, and I teamed up with a group of um of really diverse students in an entrepreneurial management course that I took. One was an MBA from uh was doing a joint degree with Harvard and Harvard, Harvard was Yale Law and Harvard Business School. Another was a primatologist from Duke, um, a very good friend to this day who'd done his work in Madagascar and was getting an MBA at Yale and was very much like a similar mindset to me. He's doing conservation finance now. And then another was an MD from Germany, and he was an MD PhD combo, and he was very sharp. And we'd created this little startup called the science.com where we were trying to create a gaming model to get kids interested in science, leveraging kind of new technology and social media. This is 1998, 99. Wow, okay, right. Yeah, so um, and then that, of course, like most startups do, it failed. I mean, we kind of went our separate ways for various reasons. And I landed at Discovery Communications in AnimalPlanet.com as a director of business development. And I that was fun at first. I I had this again romantic ideas about what happened within, you know, about about uh science media. Yeah. And I had a dream about getting science out to, you know, conservation-minded people and and kind of getting a I was interested in the Chinese alligator, some of the more how to get content out about that to the the user base at Discovery, because they had such a wide reach. But what I learned is that you know, what was more important from our end was kind of what Steve Earn was gonna name baby. Um, you know, what's he gonna call his daughter? What what what cut what type of baseball hat does he wear? You know, that the these questions that um I mean I don't know if he wore a baseball hat, but just questions that were more sort of social and in my opinion almost trivial. Yeah. But they were, you know, the public wants to have that connection. And so, you know, it there was there was a lot of good content, but I felt like there was an opportunity to do more. And um then I was kind of wooed to uh by a former friend who was an oil board board bird expert and was working at um Conservation International, where I'd also done an internship in Costa Rica uh years back to uh to come to Conservation International and get involved in working as a director of operations for their Andean. And that's where I kind of got hooked on turtles. And um, but that came after we'd built this initiative called the Eastern Tropical Pacific Seascape, which was a four-country transboundary project linking together the governments of Costa Rica, Panama, Colombia, and Ecuador in a joint effort to protect biodiversity across their EZs with an emphasis on highly migratory species. And so for me, I I went, you know, went return eventually returned to Stanford to start a PhD. I decided it was time to go back to school after working at Conservation International for several years and was lucky enough to come away with the recent CI took me on as a research fellow and um Stanford accepted me. I found a new uh advisor because so much time had elapsed, and my former advisor, and I just I had decided I wanted to work on marine-related work. So he his advice to me was you've got to go to Hopkins, of course. And I Barbara Block, who's a researcher there, was doing a phenomenal project called the tagging of Pacific Pelagics, which involved tagging 23 different species across the Pacific and kind of aggregating all of that data, you know, asking and answering a lot of really important species-driven and taxonomically driven questions along the way, but then integrating that data into a meta-analysis which would flag the most important hotspots for biodiversity across the region. So you get bang for your conservation buck. And this was the holy grail for me because I'd, you know, the whole vision of the seascape had been kind of at the time, there wasn't really um an effective mechanism for protecting uh highly migratory biodiversity in the open ocean, um, which requires extensive collaboration. And the CI's Conservation International's approach was using um terrestrial endemism of vascular plants as a proxy for endemism of other terrestrial species, and it didn't fit as nicely into a marine paradigm. Right. So we needed to develop a whole new paradigm that was more than coral reefs and seagrass beds. And that was trying to understand, you know, that tied in a lot of other um static and dynamic covariates, which is what uh the tagging of turtles led me to. And I so to get to the the great turtle race, I had to get to turtles first. And so um I found my way to turtles because I arrived at Stanford focused on tuna billfish and sharks, which are I figured commercially valuable species, non-commercially valuable species, but threatened from the targeting commercially valuable species, and then uh recreational uh species, the billfish, which has a potential to be selectively targeted and could provide income for conservation. So I I was working on a triad of species, and then these two leatherback biologists found me one day at I found and bumped into them at a meeting here in Monterey, and they said, Why don't you come to Costa Rica and tag turtles? Right. And I thought about that for a moment. I was like, the the life of a sea turtle biologist, you know, you stay up all night, you know, putting tags on and you know, you know, or wandering the beach during, you know, counting nest and you know, making sure that they're placed in safe places and keeping poachers off the beach, and then you by day you enter your data and then you just you know relax a little bit and you're on the ocean. Frank Paladino and Jim Spotilla are, you know, why you know world-renowned leatherback, still a sea turtle biologist, biologist in general, but they they had been running a long-term monitoring program at Playa Grande, and they invited me into their world, uh, to the Leatherback Trust. And so that was my kind of the first time that I my advisor, Barbara Block, was cool with it. She said, okay, you know, go with Jim and Frank. They're great, they're like my brothers. Um, you can, you know, go, you have my blessing. Uh, you know, you can still do the tuna and shark and billfish stuff too. And I was like, of course, I'm never one to say no. So I continued that um because that was always more adventure and and really great questions to ask. Uh, but I shifted my focus more to turtles, and I was the only person in our lab doing turtles because it we were a tuna lab, really, and billfish and shark. Uh. So it was a little, I sort of carved out my own space, which was exciting. And then I would go down to the nesting beach and deploy these tags. And after a couple years of deployments and looking at the data, um, you know, we used to animate the data in seven-day what we call worms. So you could kind of see movement. It was a quick way of watching how they moved. And you turn the, you'd see these worms of, you know, multiple the worms were multiple positions, daily positions, kind of come, you know, compiled together, and then you'd animate them and you could see, oh, look, and what we I noticed is that, yes, indeed, there was a corridor, which was a hypothesis that Jim and Frank and another one of their students had um promulgated in nature several years before that that there was a migration corridor between Costa Rica and the Galapagos, Cocos Galapagos area. But they the tracks were shorter, the technology wasn't quite as advanced as it was when uh I arrived on the scene with these tags that we got some were from the sea mammal research unit in St. Andrews and then others from wildlife computers. Right. Really nice satellite tags. So all of a sudden this world opened where we could see indeed, we were able to validate, you could see that this hypothesis was was was valid. They were indeed moving in a concerted way offshore. And it was fun to watch these worms go. It was like, wow, this kind of the so I had another meeting. I was like there the light went off because I had um read about the the the big bird race uh several years prior, and that was a a British um mission to put to ban these albatross um in off, I think it was off New Zealand. Um and they found a number of sponsors. Um they named named one after uh Jagger's wife, I believe, uh Bianca. And then there were some, they had some anyway, they were all kind of celebrity names. Yeah. But unfortunately, in the big bird race, the tags all um fell off. Yeah. So it was a sad failure, but it was really cool. And I thought, man, there's something here. And but I, you know, I reached out to a friend of mine and kind of who was uh associated with Conservation International. He was the chief marketing officer of uh Plantronics headsets, and he'd done a lot of work in the corporate space with different companies. Very, very clever, crafty Stanford MBA, really sharp and energetic and fun-loving. And we started brainstorming and sort of collectively we settled on the great turtle race uh as a as a as an opportunity. And we we looked to different models, even a gaming model that would be like, you know, we thought, well, we could do this on on eBay or we could do this on people could make make best in this. And then we realized no, no, we don't want to get involved in that because that's that doesn't resonate well. We'll just um get sponsorships. Yeah. And we'll use resources from the race to cover the, you know, con to invest in conservation. So we created Mark secured, his name was Mark Breyer. He's written a couple books on games, and he uh super bright guy. He secured, he secured, um, we started putting together a sponsorship list and a strategy, and we did a mock-up for what this race might look like. And Facebook was in its nascy. Right. Uh, and so was there was my MySpace, Facebook, and a couple others at the time. There were these new groups, and there was an opportunity to build characters around these turtles. So we got Mark was able to secure pro bono marketing support from McCann Erickson, a big marketing firm as they were in, which was wonderful. So they we started brainstorming, and then he got the CMO for Yahoo involved as a sp as an anchor sponsor as well. And then we brought in um Dryer's Ice Cream through some of Mark's connections and the Gordon Betty Moore Foundation, and then a couple other when we cobbled together. Do you have any big names? Yeah. Any celebrities? So so then, yeah, that was the big hit. So then we caught the attention of another uh friend um who was a tuna fisherman who came by the lab and was had an had a nephew who loved turtles, sea turtles. And he heard he heard about what we're doing, and he's like, I have an idea. Well, he he hooked me up with his sister, right? Um, Brooke, and her, their, their brother was in working for Stephen Colbert. So through them, we got access to Colbert. We pitched the idea, or they helped us pitch the idea to Colbert and Colbert's team. And lo and behold, Stephen Colbert bit. So we had now a comic voice. And that we got the Colbert bump. So when we compile, we put the race together. We had 11 turtles and we created virtual racing jerseys for each of them. We built Facebook pages and MySpace pages for all of them, and we put together a website with a whole story of the conservation actors, the community, the turtles, the work. And then I thought, you know, we could do virtual baseball cards. So, because I've always because we have stats on these turtles. We know how many eggs they laid, we know how many nests, we know if they're rookies or first-time nesters, we know if they're injured. I just kind of went back to my field notes and we, you know, we people really connected with the stories behind these turtles, which was really just narrative. I mean, they're they're turtles. This one was bitten by a cookie cutter shark, she's a survivor. This one clearly has encountered a had a boat strike. This one, you know, had been has been hooked by a long line, and there's a hole in her flipper. And and uh this one, she's a veteran. She's been coming here for you know 20 years. It becomes relatable. Very relatable. And so we created virtual baseball cards that like you could sort of look at, and then we made uh the funniest thing was there was one aspect of this we didn't even consider, and that we made a leaderboard. And it was supposed to, I thought it would up, I mean, my vision was like it updates daily, you know, and you can have the turtles shifting. But the the I had the help of the the assistance of some really sharp i IT and technically savvy um teammates, colleagues in the in the lab, in the block lab, who and and one of them had children. He just really got into it and he he made it so that he set he interpolated the data. We set all the start times of the turtles to zero, should tell you the mechanics of the race. So it wasn't real time. Okay. It was near real time. Yeah. But it wasn't real time. The turtles had already taken off. So we kind of we knew, I knew, you know, where they were going, but the race, it was impossible to do it in complete real time. Some artistic license. We had some artistic license. So but this is where it got funny. So James made the leaderboard. James was one of the the the colleagues in the lab that was doing the kind of back-end work on the with software and uh running the along with another collie Allen, both great guys, they loved it. And we had the the leaderboard updating like every 10 minutes. So it became really sticky. Oh wow. So people were like, you know, coming back to and we got traffic from all over the world, right? And people with Colbert presenting the turtles, and we named one after him, Stephanie Colbertle the turtle, right? So she had he was in, he opened four episodes of the Colbert Report with uh the Great Turtle Race. Stephanie was in the Stephanie was in front uh the first two segments, and then she got wet the Wet Wendy, the West Marines turtle here, a marine company here and the local company that's kind of now a global player, but she crept up on Stephanie and got into the lead, and Colbert accused her of cheating and laying ping pong balls. She's not, you know, she's she's a fake turtle. Back then, I mean you have to remember this was like at by the time we did the race, it was 2007, right? So Facebook, you know, all these companies were just starting, and we got you know, 700,000 unique users is a big deal. Wow. Back then. Um, we just even now, right now, and and they were from all over the world, and we and there were there were cruise ships in the Galapagos waving banners. Go Stephanie, you know, and yeah, we won, and people were writing on, I think Wendy's a real champion. She had that cookie cutter shark bite and she's persevered. And yeah. So it Yeah, it ended up we raised over $400,000. We channeled it into the purchase of the tags and into investment in the project. And then the the race was replicated the next year, and they did a C to C, a Caribbean to the Conservation International got more and got really invested. They became a partner in the first race and then really involved in the second. And I was, I couldn't um, I couldn't really sustain it because I was trying to finish my PhD and it just took lopped a year off my PhD because it was so distracting to um. I mean, I remember that the day I walked into our local coffee shop and I saw a newspaper. I was going to order a coffee and I looked down and it was the Monterey Herald, and on the front page was a big leather back, and it said, and they're off. And it started with uh an interview with myself and like the local media, and I'd forgotten to, I hadn't really it got to the point where I couldn't keep up with it. So I could I didn't tell Barb, my advisor, about this. I was just like, uh, you know, I'm having interviews right now. That's not it's not a good look for a grad student if you're you know, you got your supervisor next door. And she I came into the office that day and she's like, come into my office right now. What? I do. I got the newspaper, oh shoot, I'm in trouble. And uh so she told me, George, you can't, you know, there's there there's a risk of this the gambling happening with this. I was like, that's a barb, this is not a gambling, there's no gambling involved at all. This is this is uh done with the purest of intent, you know. We're this is a conservation race, and you could do it with other species, you could do it with billfish, you could do it with tuna, they've done it with birds. Um Uh you know, she was suspicious. Well, I found out later, like within days, that Ladbrook's casino had put odds out on these turtles. Really? So there was there was gambling happening in the UK. And I was like, oh my God, you know, we have I know the answer. Unintended consequences. Unintended consequences, but I could make some money here. No, but we we immediately are like alerted them. We're like, uh, cancel this. You guys realize, you know, we put kind of put the word out that this is you know, don't overstep because people will bet on anything. Yeah, yeah. But that was a wake-up call. And then it was so the race was replicated in a Canada-Caribbean version, which involved um Pearl Jam. Oh, right. And the uh it was right around the timing of the Olympics. So the US men's and women's uh swimming and water, I think water polo teams got involved, or at least the swimming athletes were the turtles were named you know after them, and they were giving they'd give commentary about the the race. And then there was a one race to the dateline. Every race had permutations based on the the behavior of the subpopulation that we were studying and a whole backstory. So in the in the West Pacific, the the turtles engaged in a lot of kind of search behavior and lots of circles, which isn't good for a race if you're trying to go from point A to point B and you're like this. Yeah. But we decided we needed a new criteria, like you know, we need number of circles. And uh and we threw in vertical behavior too, so that we could have extra, you know, a bit like a competition within a competition, because it was clear that you know some turtles just weren't gonna follow the rules. Right. And uh and then that all of this was replicated into a there were a lot of spin-offs all over the world that followed from this. Um, like this, there's a circ, there's a a race, uh tournament of turtles that's now happen that's been ongoing for like 20 years in the Caribbean or whatever many years, 15 years, and other groups all over now have kind of run with it, which you expect. It it's a great way of drive driving awareness, yeah, which is what we need. Well, yeah, and so so you've you've you've finished your PhD, um, you've gone through some different conservation organizations, and then upwell is that that was sort of seeing an unmet need. Yes. And the oceans, uh, I mean, we've talked already about like lots of t sea turtle conservation work is uh nesting beaches, but that's just such a tiny fraction of their life cycle. Um, is that how did what led you to uh be a co-founder of of Well? So I um that's a great question. I'm glad you uh that's I'm glad you raised that because um that was a really formative moment. I had a very close friend and colleague uh who had started to work, I brought her, she introduced her to the Leatherback Trust, and she came on as our director of operations and she's been working, she's a background in natural resource economics, uh, hasn't a PhD from Berkeley. Um her name is Kristen Reed, and she was um instrumental. She sort of challenged me um when we uh were contemplating, you know, what are we doing? You these uh we've been uh focused on on this nesting beach and on these turtles, and we're doing great things from a nesting beach conservation perspective, wonderful things, great awareness, great protection, um, almost a hundred percent protection from poaching, great vigilance, great research. Um, but are we achieving the bigger goal, which is uh, you know, recovery and conservation of this population and not just this population, but turtles more broadly. And so what is it that's driving, what are the driving threats? And that just kind of led back to that, well, we've got to look, you know, we've got to take a bigger picture approach here. The threats are at sea. They're out there 99% of the of their lives, and there's so much we don't understand. What happens from zero to 20 years of age, the lost years, right? What's what goes on in that period? Are they is that a bottleneck we're missing? Uh what why we're seeing so many turtles come back with wounds and scars and hooks in them and and maim being maimed from fisheries or dying of plastic ingestion. The threats, there are a lot of threats out there that aren't being addressed, and they're really hard to address. And so, and giving that more thought, we decided, you know, it was time to sort of spend off and start our own initiative, and we found some supporters who were willing to join us, and together the two of us created uh Upwell. And we took some time thinking about a name. We went through lots of names, and Kristen had a a colleague, some friends from college that had founded uh their own marketing company, uh, communications type work, and we brainstormed with them, um, came up with hundreds of names and winnowed it down to one, which just kind of rolled off the tongue nicely and was so much about kind of what drives, you know, as I mentioned, the the occurrence of these turtles. We once we got the name, then we worked on the logo and we found a great logo designer and we wanted a stylized uh you know leatherback, and this is what we came up with. Um and uh and so branding is a is a big part of this, and so we, you know, we the it, you know, here we are back to business, you know, the business. I actually was thinking, I love it because um you're saying you know, you had the marketing friends, and uh all throughout this conversation you've been pulling in these different players, these different characters that different roles, and and that's what conservation is. I I the people I talk to, I find that they're all sort of conductors of an orchestra that bring in all the different instruments at the appropriate moment. Yes, that's exactly exactly what you've done. And it's uh but you speak about it so eloquently, it's great, it's really, really good. And and it is the branding, it's we're we run nonprofits, but they're that that's just tax code. We're running businesses. Yes, it's just there's a tax code that's different, but all those same things apply. We need good branding, we need awareness of of what we do in order to help the animals. That's right. Yeah, you have to, and you have you need, you know, my Kristen is now the operations director of uh of Upwell, and she is these, I think she would agree that learned so much through this process as well. I mean, there's so much that you know that and she's like sort of stumbled into, I think, you know, the business side of the organization, which is super important, um, you know, because her background was more in uh on the research side and on you know in sociological and economic research, which was very complementary anyway to um to the you know the the natural history-based work that I that I focused on in my thesis. And we kind of come together in conservation as an overarching umbrella. And it and it is so interdisciplinary, those it requires myriad skill sets and keeping an organization viable, meeting all the tax codes and rules or or a nonprofit, and and I think you know, ensuring transparency, that's a really important thing. So, you know, that people that are investing you know that their money's been being spent wisely, that they can trust you, that you'll do what you'll say, you know, you you do what you say you're gonna do, yeah, and you deliver. And uh and so we we've built, I think, a really um we should I mean through Kristen's vigilance, because I find myself working on so many things at once. It's nice to have someone who we're very complimentary in what we do. We've secured like a charity navigator uh platinum stat transparency status and we're that's awesome. Really try to play by the rules and started developing uh impact reports every year and um you know just one thing after another. We're we're growing. We're now at six there's so much involved. Sorry, you were gonna say six full-time staff, and then we have um a suite of contractual scientists, researchers, and um observers that work with us, and then outside consultants from time to time on a project-specific basis. Yeah. Let's get back to the turtles, because we just touched on um the lost years, and that is um very interesting part where I'm thinking of the timeline of the turtles, um, turtle nesting beaches, um, that there's lots of work there, but there's this big gap in our knowledge um from when when they leave the nest, leave the the nesting beaches to in the case of the females when they return. Um so I what what's going on in that in that window of time and how how are you as an organization? Um what is it you're doing with these lost years? How are you advancing conservation there? So that's so that's one of the things I love about this uh this work. Um there are still so many mysteries that remain with with with you know, sea turtles are only seven species, but you know, at first blush that seems like nothing when you think about the world of birds, right? Over 9,000. But there are seven really unique species, and they've radiated into these niches, and then they've diverged into subpopulations, and they're circumglobal. So you can imagine that all of these different subpopulations are all kind of genetically unique and interesting in their own ways, and some and there are differences, you know, even though they're still the same species. So uh, but you know, aside from the nuance and and all of the kind of interesting questions around an turtle's biology, understanding um what happens between the time you, you know, most people encounter turtles, either when they're snorkeling, uh you know, say a place like Hawaii and they see a green turtle or a hawkspill swim by, uh, or at a nesting beach where a a female comes up, lays her eggs, gives, you know, leaves the beach, and then a couple months later, a bunch of little hatchlings emerge, neonates, and scrabble down to the sea, and then they disappear, where you know, many, many of them are eaten along the way. But eventually, 15, 20 years later, an adult returns or is caught somewhere in a long line or in a in a gill net, and and people are like, well, there they are. Um, but in that phase in between is something is a mystery that's kind of really intrigued scientists for forever. Um and so early pioneering work in the 1960s by scientists like Archie Carr, who's really a well-known uh now deceased but sea turtle biologist with about testing movements of turtles using balloons and watching them, you know, with a balloon towed behind them, watching the turtle go, and like really short-term uh strategies. But you do the you do you work, you know, do what you can to sort of start to unravel that mystery. Today we have all these tools at our disposal. The tech is out of control. So we we can put little tiny tags. Um I did my thesis working with the big tags on the big turtles, but I've you know I've never lost that fascination of you know applying technology for monitoring, and that was you know, something I going back to like when I started my PhD, you know, was in looking using GIS and remote sensing and to understand habitats of birds of prey. Now it's um using like microsatellite tags and satellite telemetry and acoustic telemetry to understand the movements and behaviors. Acoustic telemetry? Yeah, we use acoustic tags. So these tags that emit uh coded signal that's picked up with a receiver. Okay. And it can be either a hydrophone uh uh like that you carry on a boat and follow an animal actively, or it could be uh done um passively with receivers uh situated along the coast in areas where you think this animal where you have your research questions about overlap or behavior and where you you know this animal's likely to do it. Because sound travels so far in marine environments. You know, you can like very their very their acoustic work gives you really specific data about presence and kind of site-based you know, movement, but it doesn't provide the long-term data, of course, because once they move away from the receiver, they're you know but you get this, you get, you know, when you we double tag turtles now with both the the large adults who can carry them with both an acoustic and a sat tag, and then they shed the sat tag, or the sat tag fails usually first, but they might get picked up on an acoustic array much later. And we we we saw that happen with a leatherback we tagged in co on the Caribbean side of Costa Rica that um at at uh Pacquiao Reserve that in you know the tag if the turtle went out into the Colombian gyre, and about 50 days later the tag failed, the sat tag. So we thought that we assumed that the turtle either died, the sat tag fell off. We don't know. Um and then like five or six months later, we got a a message from um from the Canadians in eastern Canada, and they we uh that that a turtle in there uh had been picked up in an array off of um in the Gulf of St. Lawrence near the like a very like up near Rummuski, up in the way up in the Gulf. Yeah, it was really crazy. Um Wow. Yeah. So that was uh you know, that just kind of kind of helped demonstrate the utility of multiple approaches. And um we've been since we've been working with a team out of Florida at the Loggerhead Marine Life Center and Florida Atlantic University to deploy acoustic tags and test the you know the this approach on leatherbacks as they migrate up the Gulf Stream and up the eastern seaboard where there are extensive receiver networks, and we're getting great results from that. And we're now we're doing it with turtles in the Pacific, but the receiver networks are a little more scattered and the turtles are less shelf-based, but they do come in for several months, and we can get, you can imagine, like working with fishermen, we could get get the you know, fishers to deploy um receivers with their gear, using their gear as opportunistic mooring points. Yeah, and then we're the question we have is we you know, how can we prevent turtles from being entangled? So if we get we can kind of get a closer, um better more clo better understand the overlap of of sea turtles with fishers and with gear, and that will help us to you know I think develop strategies that are uh better informed. In in Malaysia, um Louisa, who I spoke with, they're they're deploying, I think they call them bananas, and they're uh it's a yellow device, I think it's banana because it's yellow, that emits signals to to discourage marine mammals from coming near near nets. Um but going back so Oh, so for the lost years, yeah. The lost years, going back to that. Is that specifically leatherbacks or all turtles? All turtles. Yeah, we and and you're collecting movement data with these with this technology. Um, and are you you sort of building up a better understanding of where they're going? Yes. So what we're so we're using um at the moment, we're so the big challenge has been miniaturizing tags for a number of reasons, because you're you know, their battery constraints, the there's fragility, um, these little tags um, you know, have shorter lifetimes typically than the the larger tags you'd put on adults. But uh here heretofore it's been impossible to get information about these little turtles. So we're happy to get every little bit of data we can. And we've spent with the team, we had a student um that I would who I um I was on her committee and one of her thesis chapters was focused on um tracking leatherbacks out of Pakware using acous towed acoustic tags. We had a little tag on a float, attached the turtle with a little bit of um there's a little velcro uh uh we used a vet bound, which is uh like a veterinary glue, attached the the velcro to the turtle's back, and then um had a little hook there on the Velcro patch that from which a line uh trailed, and then there was a little fishing bobber, and then the the tag would dangle behind that, and we'd go out and follow the turtle with a hydrophone, and she did this for weeks um in the blazing sun or in the pouring rain. It was one or the other. There was no canopy on the boat. Yeah, and the little hatchling doesn't move very fast. A little neonate moves very slowly. So yeah, you're just like put, putt- putt putt putt for three hours, and then we were releasing drifters as well because we wanted to understand are these turtles moving actively or passively? Are they just drifting or are they, you know, um are they thinking, are they on a trajectory? Yeah. Um, and sometimes we'd lose those drifters in the surf and have to chase them down. But the the drifters gave us like kind of what where the currents would take you. Okay. And the turtles gave us where the turtle wants to go. And usually it was largely influenced by currents, but there was directionality and there was uh the what we you know, the indication um uh of or determination of active movements. Right. And then we had a subsequent student who carried that work, he continued the work and was able to flag kind of a threshold in current speed. So when if the turtles were swimming against the current and and it the turtle the current reached a certain speed, velocity, the turtle would pretty much stop expending energy. Why bottom? Just cruise. And just cruise and then resume when you know when the time was right. But they they all kind of followed a similar orientation, but they were a different depending on the strength of the you know prevailing current, right? Counter current. Yeah. So that makes me think of there was a wimbrel that was tracked trying to fly south from from you know the the Arctic or something. I can't remember. But it was like it it was in a headwind of a storm doing something like nine miles an hour for for nine hours or something. I can't remember the exact, but then it got kind of to the other side of the storm and was doing like a hundred miles an hour relative to land speed, and then just like we just got ripping along. Yeah. Yeah. I I can imagine that the the you know these turtles will get you know rapidly pulled in those storms. Do you think that they intentionally it does a survival dep like are they do they survive, have greater survival probability if they get into these currents? Because they is that an adaptive to take advantage of the current? Yeah, you know, it could be. We're seeing off South Africa that um, you know, we've been working with the Two Oceans Aquarium Foundation releasing turtles, and we've noticed that um in area if we release them, like say at the in Cape Town off of Cape Town, yeah um in that area you've got a can you know an area where you've very a very cold current that's moving north um and it's sluggish. Um versus the you know the other side of of Africa, uh Sedwana Bay and and you know um in where you have a much warmer southern southern flowing current that's kind of like the equivalent Gulf Stream equivalent but flowing south, and animals get you know get into that current and they just get the sh shunted down, but they have time to acclimate, you know, on a belt all the way down to the you know to the tip of Africa, right? And then they end up sort of circling around in eddies and they run into the retroflection zone where the two currents converge, the Bengalis and the Angolas current come together. And then the turtles will be dispatched into these rings. Well, they'll go in circles for a while, or some might swing off and head to the west. And some even go around the Cape and up towards Namibia. But if you do the releases on the on the west coast of Africa and right into the cold current, it's a little probably a bit of a shocker for the for the turtles who've been sitting in rehab for a while, because these are all you know, would often would be cold stun turtles that have been rescued. Yeah, and then they're like, whoa, and they go into what is very productive, an amazing, productive, cold environment, but it's it's amazing for a lot of reasons, and it brings in a lot of predators too. And if you're kind of like the current's not there to whisk you away, and there's lots of big things out there, yeah, it can be a bit of a challenging situation. So on the other side, even if there are, and we know there's lots of big predators and those big sardine runs that happen off the east coast of South Africa, the current's moving pretty fast, so you you can kind of make hay and get out of there and just go with it. And there's there's a lot, there's plenty to eat. Um and by the time you get around into the colder water, you you've kind of figured it out, I think. Yeah. You've had a chance to get uh acclimatized. So the the the the Lost Years program has really morphed. It started with basic questions about using acoustic tags, which we at the time we didn't have these miniature sat tags, but it's it's really developed because we've built a strong uh relationship with one of the tag manufacturers. And this was something that years ago we um a colleague, several colleagues and I got together and we hosted a workshop at a biologging symposium that focused on um tag miniaturization. And and it's you know, you have uh in the tag the tagging world, there are there are it's it's kind of dominated by um uh a small suite of companies. Yes. And it's like um building a satellite tag is like building a new pharmaceutical product. There's a tremendous capital that goes into it up front. You have to cover software design, engineering, um, you know, people's salaries, coding. But once the tag is built, the components are, you know, probably the the tag in and of itself is probably you know not worth the price. I mean, not even probably. Like, but you're paying for all the R D the investment in RD. And that makes sense to me. But it's hard when you the the the demand is we we'd like to think, you know, C Trobiologists, these tags where there's plenty of people using them, but the reality is, you know, I I've been I've been asked the question too by the tag manufacturers. So how George, how how many um what what's the market for this? How many of these tags you think we can sell in a year? And I'm like, well, maybe it's not that big. Um we might buy a hundred, but how many other, you know, it would get very myopic. Um, and then you there's this expectation in the the bio the biology community that these tags should be cheap. Why they're the the components are only 50 bucks. You could get these somewhere else, where, you know, show me where you can get them. But you know, there there are competitors that have entered and there's open source soft, you know, so software and coding, and and there are groups out there that are, you know, which is great because it fosters competition, drives the prices down, but that are engaged in you know trying to create their own bespoke tags. But it's it's we've I think we've been very fortunate because we've developed strong relationships with a couple of different tag manufacturers for different projects. And with the lost years, we've worked most closely with a company called Low Tech, and they've been very uh willing to experiment with us, to c take our input, to um help design because we were these things just didn't exist. Two gram tags we're using now. Uh with solar cells with depth sensors and pressure sensors. So you're also you are also tracking depth with the with the micro tags. There are two models. There's a 2.4 gram one and a 12-gram one. So we're the idea was to develop a s a gr a suite of stage-based tags. So we could have tags that kind of grew with the turtles. Are you able to then catch a turtle and if it's got the f stage one and then go in and catch it and then upgrade its tag? That would be really, really difficult because they still just kind of go out into the Great Blue yonder. Um most of the species, most but even like across the board, this these are the first two years of you know for most of these turtles is is uh is is plagic. So so a tiny little t leatherback turtle is leaving the beach and going straight out into the ocean. And what what are they eating? So they're opportunistic, they're eating whatever they can get their mouth around, and that's why they're very vulnerable to plastics. Right. Um and a lot of them die of plastic ingestion. But as they and this is so so that question touches on ontogeny, right? Like when do when do you see shifts in turtles development based on age? Um and so and that's a big fundamental question, you know, for the last year's work is like trying to trying to pinpoint when these ontogenetic shifts occur and what drives them. And so um when do they go through dietary shifts and how is that uh where what's the signal in their behavior and in their environment that suggests that they're transitioning? We noticed uh, you know, we noticed we work closely with a team in Thailand that that's been able to rear leatherbacks to up to two years, and they do it very, very well. And we're working um to document uh the the growth of these turtles with a series of measurements in captivity. So they picked up a signal that there's a shift occurring around six months, for example, in leatherbacks. Um and the leatherbacks are heretofore uh essentially impossible to see one. Any no um very few people on the planet have seen a three-month-old leatherback, six-month-old leatherback. You know, the only way to do that is to rear them in captivity. Right. And there's tremendous learning that can come from that process about ecophysiology and conservation physiology and turtle biology in general. So we've been able to pick up, you know, and notice something really unique. And and this has carried over. We have a partnership with the Digital Uh Life 3D lab in the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where we work with a whole team led by a fellow named Duncan Urshik to and his students to create animated 3D models of and he's got, if you visit the website, they have the 3D Life, uh, what is it, the Digital Life Project. They have renderings in 3D of many different animals. Turtles are just sea turtles are just one of them. But we're trying to build an animated model of leatherback development from um you know from the neonate, newborn all the way to the mature adult. And so it's really trippy to watch when you see these little leatherbacks are they're tiny little things and they're they're they've got little scales and they they don't they they bear a resemblance for sure to the to the adults, but they um they go through so much change. They go from being a thing that you know that's that's uh 30 grams to uh you know an animal that's uh almost 2,000 pounds. Yeah. Um and that and they grow really quickly. So and so they're you ask about their diet and it it changes eventually. There is a tipping point where they start to, you know, they're at one point they're eating whatever, they can get their mouth round, then suddenly they start to become more selective and then they specialize. Right, okay. And and that when and where they specialize is important to know, but and as so too, because those are probably important areas to Yeah. Well, I was gonna kind of I'm wondering, so you said the key thing that you said when and where, which uh in biology terms we'd say the spatial and temporal distribution. Yes. But that um is that what you're getting from this data that then uh can you then apply that to conservation? Is that the the goal? So we're building um species distribution models and habitat suitability models based on the data that we're uh pulling in from the from these tags. So we can take the positions we get from the tags and then we can use remotely sensed uh satellite data to and and you know um ocean modeled data to kind of understand what are the kind of critical environmental covariates associated with the turtles in this temporal spatial context. Oh. And look at their behavior while they're in those areas. How are they diving? How you know what's what are they doing? Are these foraging dives? Are these, you know, move are these uh searching behaviors? And then we can take it a step further and say, well, what else is going on in that area where these turtles are doing these things? What are their threats? Right. And new technologies like Global Fishing Watch have enabled us to pull in vessel data, which we can then use to either assess the risk for ship strikes or assess the risk for interaction. And by looking at our predictive models, so much of the work we do is based on modeling because you can only tag so many turtles. But the turtles are really good for validating the models and for providing real-time data. There's no getting around real-time data, but at the end of the day, it you know, the ocean's changing, you have limits, limited resources, and so you want to take, do the best you can to acquire as much data and I think in a holistic way across the life history, if you can, of the species and the or the even the population, if you can get to that level. So you understand um where are the nursery habitats? Where are the you know the grow the habitats where these turtles grow and develop? Where are they going to breed? Where are they going to where are the hotspots for foraging? And you can develop a um a dynamic management strategy that takes into consideration the shifting movements of these animals in real time. Right. So then are you having success when you've you've got this, uh you're building up this map of where they're going and when and what they're doing there. And that that's 3D in that they're okay this month, they're in this area and they're doing deep dives, but over when they're here, they're not doing deep dives. This is this is mind-blowing the the the complexity of this. It's a lot of uh nowadays AI is helping out with the well, yeah, yeah. That's interesting. I mean, that's great. That but then are you able to then um your work with fishes? Is that where you're able to then kind of bring about move the needle for turtles? It's good you touched on that. Uh, I think that's the most complicated part of the job is the human dimension. Sure. Um, it just it always is uh in so many ways. But so that the the tagging and the field research is really fun and it's it's like a it's a pursuit. And the biology is easy, uh relatively speaking. I mean, for us you know, animal people. Yeah. It is, it's exciting, it's engaging, it's you know, it's thought provoking. And don't get me wrong, working with people is awesome. You we couldn't get the work done without it, but it brings in a whole suite of challenges that are uh in many ways very unpredictable people or anything if predictable, you know, or but predictable. But um, and that a lot of that, you know, like working with we that's where it all has to go. So all this information that we're that's the whole reason we developed Upwell is to figure out a way to get at this information empirically so we would have you know quantitative, robust models to work with, and then to get that information in the hands of policymakers and decision makers. And so that last step, you find that there are good actors and bad actors and actors who haven't yet figured out what they what they want to be. And in a political context, like governments are always turning over and changing. And you know, things can you can be on a great trajectory for four years and then boom, you're in a real mess, and um, it's unknown whether or not you get out of it. And that's uh over and over again you see this. There are a lot of governments that that um you know that oversee, you know, that because of the nature of their movements and their their their kind of broad distribution, sea turtles are are vulnerable everywhere. And you know, and and so trying to get governments, we try to leverage conventions like the Inter-American Sea Turtle Convention or Regional Fisheries Management Organizations, but they, you know, like IATTC, the Inter-American Tropical Tuna Commission, or the RFMOs, the regional fishery management organizations in the Central and North Pacific, or ICAT in Europe. I mean, they're all over the world. Um, the oceans are governed by these inter multi and multilateral bodies, right, with different um governments. It has to be because the the turtles don't care. The turtles don't care, but you but the the problem is, you know, it you have to count on you know people to act in the best interest of humanity and of wildlife, and that's often not the way it works. So, you know, there'll be 95 people that are uh you know, representatives of different governments that agree on something, and then there'll be five that don't. And that's enough to, you know, politics comes into play, and then it's you take that from me, you're gonna get this then in return. And so, you know, you're like, can't you can't we all get along and save these turtles? They're just turtles, but there's so much more behind it. Yeah. Um, you know, you talk about trade sanctions or something, and that, you know, there's always a a cost. I think you know, decision makers are constantly weighing those and saying, is what means more? You know, loss of leatherbacks and an eco ecological role or or no more access to chips. Um Yeah. Well, I think from what I know of your work, you've done great stuff of um building bridges there, and instead of it being um hitting conservation against uh Fisher's livelihoods, you've managed to build build some bridges, uh, and and that is for the benefit of the Tolls. I think that's that has been a big success of your work, where yeah, it's you managed to engage those communities. Here's another way we come at it, now that you you mentioned it, because I have this book in front of me. We wrote, I wrote a with a co-author, Helen Bailey, this children's book many years ago, which was right when I started having, you know, what when when we started building a family, that's my daughter up there, and she uh this was kind of dedicated to our I dedicated it to, well, Helen and I to our kids and and um it's called the Grande Turtle Adventure, but it's based on satellite tracking data from Playa Grande, where we took the whole data set and then we're like, well, the people were really, we want, you know, for Eastern Pacific leatherbacks, they're fishing communities all over the all over South America and Central America on the coast. Um and these fishermen, they all have kids, and you know, they if you know it's like the cigarette getting you know the tobacco, uh the best way to in to to get parents to change their behavior is maybe to their kids hounding them and saying, why are you doing that? Recycle mom, stop smoking, you know, do whatever. Yeah. Um so we uh we figured if we could share something, you know, with communities and with you know um stakeholders in the region, uh one nice tactic tactic could be to have a book uh that documents a story in Spanish and English and then get the book out into these communities and share it um with children. And I, you know, it just kind of grassroots education, but um education outreach I'm as I'm learning and you know by doing with our team is just such an important part of of what we do as well and of conservation. It's it's an interesting challenge, isn't it though? Because the um it's so indirect. Uh it it's a it's almost like it's sort of seems like PR in a way, where um the kids are not the ones that are impacting the turtles. But it it's it's a strategic move to to getting where you want to get and also investing in the future. Um but I I love that there's the the book and and um we've we've got one on on the parrots as well, and it that it's it's a yeah, they're it it's a useful tool. Um but it's interesting that you're so you know the organization's work is it spans a whole range of areas where you're doing research, there's outreach, and there's policy. Um what are the bits am I I'm missing of what are key key parts of what you do? I think those are the the three kind of those are three pillars for sure. Right. Um research, education, awareness, policy. Um I think you that's the essence of uh those are kind of the it's a classic. Yeah, I mean I'm trying to think, is there anything different than you know we I think you know uh uh we're grounded in some pr pretty solid principles around um I mean uh you know, doing this work, the empathy um and uh transparency and maybe perseverance because conservation, you know, as you know, is like one step forward, two steps back, and it's a constant uh you have to really have a tolerance for getting beaten over the head, you know. You just it's very challenging to, but you get you there are victories. You've but you've scaled, which is something I wanted to come to where um I mean you we've talked about New Zealand and and Australia, and I think there was something like uh also the work of Upwell is now reaching beyond California into uh Oregon and then Washington. Um how have you what's helped you get that scale and how have you done that? So it's getting the word out, it's finding committed supporters. Um we've been able to kind of take our message to um organizations and individuals who believe in us, and we've gotten, I think what also what's great is afra, you know, what's a uh some it's it's affirmation is government agencies as well to support our efforts in California through the Ocean Protection Council, through the Bureau of Ocean Energy and Management off the US West Coast. We have a really strong partnership with NOAA. We work with government agencies in Australia and New Zealand. Uh recently we were um we we basically ported the leatherback survey work that we do here, and we're trained, we train the also the Kiwi team, the uh New Zealand team in tag deployment and vessel-based captures and hope to do more of that. And um we're supported by the government of New South Wales to do uh population viability analysis of leatherbacks off the their coast and also um to do this species distribution model, which is also comes with a risk management tool that we developed. And that that's a paper that's um gonna be under review soon. But that so we've we you know we kind of ported the the the original Turtle Watch was developed by NOAA and was applied off the US West Coast and was specifically kind of targeting the Hawaii long lane fleet and trying to reduce interactions, and that that's a very well-managed fleet, so there's really good observer data, and fishermen have an opportunity, there's real good access to like the you know, there's there's teeth, a little bit of teeth behind the tool. Yeah. So I mean, fishermen are more there's a willing, you know, more willing to adopt or at least explore uh ways that they could mitigate against bycatch. But in in other in other regions around the world, these tools haven't existed. So we've developed one for South for basically for the eastern Pacific population we call South Pacific Turtle Watch. And the idea there is a species distribution model informed by fisheries observation data plus um the tracking data. And then of course remotely sensed environmental data. But before we did that, there weren't there there weren't too many tools that were kind of integrating, it's called an integrated joint species distribution model, these these um multiple kind of unique data sets because we need every bit of data we can about the presence of turtles that's yeah that's valid. Um because that's the only way we can build these things is more data, and a lot of these areas lack observer coverage, so we're we're gleaning however we can get it. Yeah. Um and then we built this tool and we've been working to kind of figure out a way we can get different different governments to adopt it. And I think part of that means training um, you know, training people and government agencies, staff, and how to kind of continue to build this model, how to update the model, how to use the model, and every in every situation you're targeting, you know, who's gonna use it? What is it that resonates with stakeholders? If it's artisanal fishermen, it might be different from commercial fishermen working in a totally different environment who get their information differently. How do we get this content into the hands of the people that are having the impact and encourage them to use it? So I think with things like these tools have to almost be like a franchise strategy where you know you you take uh a company and you look at what you know, you let it adopt adapt to the region where it's modal principles and then replicate. Replicate it and and then it, you know, we want it to look like this. Go for it. We want it to, you know, it's gonna be used by these people. In fact, we're not even no one's using a cell phone. An app's not gonna work. You need to have the you know the information transmitted by radio. Right. You know, who knows? Or maybe at a town meeting once a week to the fishers, or you know, you don't you just it depends on it's all relative to the audience. So every country has you know its own nuance. Yeah. And so, you know, our idea was to develop, and right now we're working on a broader, integrated, full basin model with uh the East Pacific Turtles and the West Pacific Turtles in partnership with UC Santa Cruz and NOAA to like build something that's even bigger and hopefully that we can and transferable with a tool that could come with it that could be given to governments around the world to use to better understand the impacts that they might have and and weigh the risk. You know, if we target this fish at this time of this species at this time of year, what's the likelihood of interacting with leatherbacks or other sea turtle species in this area? Yeah. And that goes back to like then we understand the vertical behavior, and we've added, we published a paper in Conservation Bio. Another student I advised, Nicole Barbour, it's a great paper, about um specifically she used AI techniques, uh cluster analysis, and then a dive classification analysis to look at behaviors of leatherbacks that we then you know were able to predict that leatherbacks are, you know, are likely to be in this area at this intensity. And if they are there, these are the types of behaviors you might expect for them to be doing. Yeah. And what then then the next step is so what fisheries are operating in that area and what gear types are gonna be or put turtles at greatest risk. And if you can kind of identify who the players are and what gears that they're using are most risky for turtles who are behaving typically this way in this environment at this time, then maybe they can work around that. They can continue to you know fish a certain way, but not another. You know, it's always just kind of figuring out the trade-offs and providing the information that could help them make decisions. When when we first met, um, it was in Costa Rica and we were looking at reintroduction or translocation, and I remember that you were doing some pretty you were you and the team the of folk that were there were looking at some really innovative stuff with leatherbacks. How can you tell us a little bit more about that project and and update me on I'm really curious to know like how things have developed since we uh we were there 2017, maybe something like that. So it's been um that that is an initiative that's taken a lot of um of fortitude and perseverance and just kind of uh hanging in there because uh I think it's one of the most uh controversial topics in the sea turtle community that I've ever um had to deal with. And uh it's just because there are a lot of people with very solidified opinions on rewilding and reintroduction of turtles, and I don't fully understand it because um it's a strategy that's been used again and again in the terrestrial environment, and even now it's being done in the marine environment with sharks, but there is just so much uncertainty and doubt swirling around the efficacy of potential XC2 cunts or you know, manipulations of hands-on management. Hands-on management with sea turtles. And I think I'm not sure what drives that. I think a lot of it's rooted in age-old assumptions that um were created uh during a period when the technology just wasn't there. And if you can imagine when some of the early head starting or rewilding initiatives started, one of them being the Cayman Turtle Center, then called the Cayman Turtle Farm, it evolved in part to address local needs for a turtle resource. People were consuming turtle and in the hopes that it would achieve some sort of sustainability, um, and then turned into a more focused uh effort on recovery, awareness, and conservation. And um for years there was question as to whether or not the program was contributing to um the recovery of the green turtle population that was nesting in the Caymans, and and they found more most recently that uh over 90% of the turtles that are breeding in the Cayman Islands now are related to a mixed brood stock that came from all over northern South America and the Caribbean region and even the United States. So these turtles were were brought to the Caymans and Cayman Islands, and they um over time um the the Cayman Islands, uh the Cayman Turtle Center started uh releasing a proportion of these turtles, and they found that they now have a uh fairly stable and growing uh green turtle nesting population. So um the the naysayers will argue that well green turtles are our our population and health is improving across the board. That there's some truth in that, but I think we can look at the genetics of this population you can see that that there's related nest. And that points us to the kind of I think success. And that and you know has emerged as a good example of where uh head head starting has worked. And then if you think back to when this was occurring, there was no knowledge about temperature dependent sex determination in turtles. So when uh the Kempst Ridleys were being um head started off the US, off the Gulf Coast and the United States a big recovery effort to s to save this very in endangered what you might call restricted range marine turtle that you know has exhibits a lot of residency in U.S. waters along the Gulf region and up the eastern parts of the eastern seaboard but these turtles were critically endangered also in sorry and they're also in Mexico as well along the Mexican Gulf Coast and a huge effort went into trying to recover them and rearing turtles but there wasn't this knowledge that uh above a certain temperature turtleskew very female. Right. So the proportion of turtles in the nest they were creating potentially releasing a lot of turtles that um of of of a single gender. Um and that can lead to a lot of other um complications genetically and uh and it's he hard to get results. But I I think it's interesting that we're not there's no forgiveness there that we're working it out and we're learning. Like there's some early parrot reintroduction work that was done and it and it caused an immense challenge to to continue to experiment and learn about reintroduction and the vast amount of benefit that it can bring. And so it's it's a it's very interesting that there's so many parallels in in different environments but it's the same thing. It's the same old thing and I think the problem with turtles that makes it really hard is that they go out to sea during this last year's phase and you don't see them again for 20 years and and with in the absence of you know DNA fingerprinting which we have now so a turtle could be uh you know disappear from the beach but then in a a year or two years or even maybe even sooner a fisherman catches it somewhere we get a DNA sample and we can trace it back to that source population. That's we need quick monitoring and that was really hard with sea turtles to get so you the uh the team that was doing these reintroductions had to confront the reality that they didn't have hard data that or evidence to show that you know this was successful and it took so long to get it. Now that data is coming in as these turtles have aged and cohorts are returning but it's taken a long time and they didn't have satellite tracking technologies like akin to what we have today. So they couldn't measure, they couldn't see survivorship. They couldn't measure the success of their work in a real in a real short time frame and see yeah these little turtles we've released are actually surviving. They didn't just go out there and die. And their behaviors are similar to what we'd expect um to see in in this with turtles in this population. We can make inferences about um turtle movement based on learned migration when you get tracks of adult turtles you're kind of looking at a reflection of what they experienced as babies. That's the at least that's the theory and we can sort of see the parallels when we look at the tracks of these younger turtles and the evidence that are that exists from adult tracking. So th this project in specifically was head starting is is uh having collecting eggs and raising turtles up to a certain age and then releasing them at that age. Is that right? That's right. The the theory is that you're giving them um a head start over uh high the all of the sort of to beat the predation that's based largely on size um uh that turtles can encounter during these really early stages so their strategies grow fast that for the turtles get bigger than the next biggest jaw gape and you start to see these changes in morphology where they get kind of wider and rounder at least with the hard shelled turtles and even the leatherbacks have the the little growth jump that I was mentioning at about six to seven months and that in part um is a way to get bigger than the next biggest mouth. Right. And so if you can boost their survivorship by a certain percentage just by holding them a little longer and then that's it becomes sort of a jump start and then releasing them that's really potentially could could help augment the population. But you know what what's really important and this is you know fundamental to the head starting is that you continue to m protect the nesting beaches so the play the turtles have a place to return to and you ri mitigate the threats. But in the case of Eastern Pacific leatherbacks and reduce those threats in the case of eastern Pacific leatherbacks it's a race against time because the threats are so pernicious and so sweeping that it's in at least from what I've seen and what you know what what's obvious but you know looking at the the number of the where these turtles go and the the the the power sort of the the amount of pressure they fishing pressure they encounter is it's gonna be really hard to achieve the reductions that our population viability analyses say are required to move the needle. So just even to ensure persistence is is very difficult. It's not going to happen unless we can get a 40% reduction in bycatch for example in the eastern Pacific in 20 years. And and the how and then what's really interesting is that those bycatch those percentages of bycatch reduction are really amorphous like what does that really mean bycatch where bycatch when what type of bycatch and so trying to pinpoint exactly how to do these reductions we just don't have time. There's not enough time left. Yeah and I and I so it's interesting when I I see uh here resistance to hands-on management uh the the alternative is very clear it's for me it's like the trends are clear if we don't take action there these populations whether it's parrots or any other or turtles or any other species ondoors yeah they're gonna they're gonna be gone um so um it baffles me that people are not more open to hands-on management and I've seen something with the turtles where um the population was going to be functionally extinct by 2080 I think it was or something like that. And so um uh it it's like well why why wouldn't we try the this nothing to lose because you're gonna lose that's what I was thinking from the that's that's what that's kind of where you know where that's where I come from that's my my um rationale on this is you know in even like the the concept of translocation just blow it makes people makes the sea turtle community makes their heads spin. People just it's a hard one to process moving them from one basin to another and you're like, well I mean these basins it wasn't that long ago and this is the Caribbean to the Pacific Pacific. It wasn't that long ago that the Panama Canal was underwater. Right. Right? Three million years ago you have this is an animal with a really shallow lineage it's panmitic it's not you know at the end of the day you can be a purist and argue for saving this the the the the the differentiation that that exists within the genes of this subpopular or this populate subpopulation or management unit. But what is it going to get you? Well what it might get you is the loss potentially of um this population on the other side and and what does that mean for for leatherbacks globally? Well it means that the Pacific has lost um an ecosystem you know an ecosystem function an animal that goes out there and it's not just you know the purity of the genes you know that we should be worrying about we should be learning worrying about losing an ecosystem role. Yeah. The jellyfish are out there mopping up a third of their body weight a day and let in or the leatherback sorry and jellyfish. Right you see they're yeah those are the same jellyfish too that are consuming larval, you know larval the larvae of commercially viable important species. Right. Or this trophic cascade so you know at the end of the day you kind of have to come to the grips with the reality of look this is a mess we've made. Yeah. Humans have done this. We've done it to ourselves and humans should have to fix it. So um what's fix fixing it will come with with a cost but I mean you know we shouldn't get into the weeds if we're not just you know about I think about the the nuance of translocation in this context because you also have a you have a population that's probably genetically very truncated. There's massive inbreeding depression you know when you reach this size yeah there's very they're very it's very difficult to even find a mate. Right. And so you know maybe you add hybrid vigor then there's this issue of shifting baselines and I I re remember hearing that Columbus's men on the ship complained that they couldn't sleep because of so many turtles hitting the boat. Turtles have faced so much dramatic loss I really admire the work that that you're doing. How do you stay hopeful? Yeah you have I think you have to just main to try and keep maintain a sense of optimism and then find the right there are a lot of people in the world who bring you down but you kind of make keep a careful eye on keep the ones who bring you up the closest because they're all um who who who believe in what you're doing and who are inspired and and inspire you as you know in this in the field and look for examples outside of you know um outside of the community with other species other other taxa and and champions who've persevered and succeeded. I think that you know and and think about the greater the greater goal and I think incrementally like we went from that workshop in 2017 to having uh unfortunately covet hit us and then we had a big workshop um online which was very very challenging over like five uh meetings with a really diverse group of like 70 different researchers with strong opinions and lots of coalitions and collusion being formed and I just it was amazing how um I mean my head was spinning at the end of it how challenging that was um it was exhausting but we we reached a consensus that more research needed to be done which then enabled us to kind of okay you know address because so much of the the arguments against head starting have been hand a lot of hand waving um and people just hanging on to preconceived notions and ideologies without you know willingness to embark at least experiment and and and and test assumptions and test hypotheses and so we you know we followed we got at least we we got a consensus statement that to do the research which at first blush sounds like well that seems like an easy out but the good news is that then we moved on and and uh had a research workshop to talk about what you know the research priorities were and kind of systematically go through them and raise those questions and that's where we are now so we've had two workshops to follow from that and we're moving towards trying to to actually challenge some of these assumptions and try and get at what are the real implications of doing this. And I think one other important thing to point out was I noticed within the community that there's this there's some misconceptions, what I would call misconceptions or there are certainly preconceptions about head starting and XC2 management measures, even though we've been doing XC2 for decades with sea turtles we relocate nest, we water nest and shade nest. I mean there is human intervention but it's just the the concept of captive rearing and release that really sets this apart. And I think there's a fear in the community a lot of a lot of the nesting beach monitoring teams have been doing the the same dedicated work and these are really committed people. Like what they're doing is amazing against all odds protecting these beaches but it there's a certain comfort in doing this not being challenged by to have to do new things um but to carry on with what you've been doing and what you know works. And if you've been told for decades that this is bad then there's you know why go there? Yeah if that was the ideology then why test it? Don't rock the boat. You know and a lot of these groups are recipients of funding that may not allow for that type of flexibility. So there's a fear that you know I think two from these groups that if they go, if they try a different route or test a different pathway they may risk losing resources from committed funders. And then there's this also this fear that if money is invested in head starting or XC2 measures that are different but in truth are complementary right to NC2 measures because never would you want to forego those you have to do it all together that that will take money away from conservation on the ground their conservation their NC the model that they're cut accustomed to and I think nothing could be more wrong because uh you're I think at the end of the day it's it's it's you build a bigger pie. You don't there to to think that there's just a discrete amount of fund resources out there for conservation I think is is is wrong headed you have to be creative grow a bigger pie and as part of that you um a bigger funding pie uh resources you could drive you potentially have an opportunity to drive more resources to the NC2 side of things you you can channel more funding into bycatch mitigation into nesting beach conservation everybody wins. Yeah we've seen the same thing with uh buying rainforest to protect it and that those donors then also support more of the other stuff it's not a competitive competitive thing it is that bigger pie um of course conservation needs needs more we need more pie um but uh it isn't a competition I agree with you those resources are there you just have to create the right argument and the PVA that we did with the IUCN um cap um uh what is Conservation Planning Specialist group and their team with using the Vortex model was um and we discussed this uh with Phil Miller in the workshop in 2017 and uh the whole team was there I mean there was I think Doug um anyway yeah the whole IUCN team and that was our first introduction to Vortex for for Upwell um and since then we've had some great uh a great you know uh graduate student who's really taken it to a new level and we've done a number of PVAs on the source population of Western Atlantic leatherbacks and looked at okay which populations could handle um usage of a certain percentage of eggs a small percentage from doomed nest that were laid below the tide line and um and it you know there are at least four where you could transl do translocation you know populations where that could be done and readily and you could those eggs are easy to transport you could test the model see if it do turtles behave the way you would expect they would upon release do they survive? How well do they survive? We could it would change our assumptions and the modeling too we were very conservative when we modeled this but our models the modeling effort we did which has been published shows that you know you by augmenting the population at a level of say 4,000 to 6,000 um turtles a year and coupling that with different bycatch mitigation strategies, you can ensure persistence even without changing the bycatch you can at least have persistence. Right, right um which is keeps you at zero but not below and maybe buy some time but if you could achieve the bycatch um you know reductions alongside the augmentation you can actually start to see growth of the population and which is where we want to be so but if we don't do anything and just keep on keeping on the way we are there there's one thing I think that's pretty certain. Yeah you're gonna lose the the first you'll lose the East Pacific leatherback population and then you'll lose the west yeah and um and that would be that's a sad day when you lose an animal like the leatherback a living dinosaur from Pacific. But I'm I uh feel even more optimistic about their future uh having chatted with you today and learned more about Upwell's great work I'm I'm excited to look up some of the things we've talked about and see see me some of that stuff online and um I hope to see one myself one day and I just want to say huge thank you to to you and your team for uh everything you do thank you for chatting with us today yes and um yeah look forward to seeing seeing where things go thank you you bet thank you very much Sam