COSTA RICA: LEATHERBACK NESTING GROUND AT RISK.
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[The following article by Leslie Josephs is reprinted with the permission of Noticias Aliadas/Latinamerica Press in Lima, Peru. It was posted March 10, 2010]
Up and down Costa Rica's Pacific coast are thousands of beach houses, hotels, and condominiums, part of the real estate boom that started here in the 1990s, fueled largely by wealthy foreigners looking to escape cold northern winters.
But on Playa Grande, a strip of pristine, powdery sand that is the last major nesting ground for endangered leatherback turtles in the eastern Pacific, the boom has not hit. Yet.
The government of outgoing President Oscar Arias is trying to push through the legislature a reform that would open the area to real estate development that has overrun parts of the coast, threatening the already-endangered turtles.=20
Las Baulas National Marine Park was created in 1991 in an effort to protect the species whose nesting populations had shown a rapid decline years earlier.
The park means that 125 meters of land from the average high-tide point are protected. The few dozen lived-in housing units along the coast are required to use specially designed red and green lights at night so as not to disturb the turtles as they are nesting. Last year, Arias' government proposed downgrading the national park to a refuge, which would protect only 75 meters of land, so that homeowners within the park could continue their stalled construction projects and move in, saving the government hundreds of millions in expropriation fees. =20=20=20=20=20 Two-pronged problem
Still, despite nearly two decades of protection efforts under the national park, the turtle populations are still declining, in large part because of longline fishing and by gillnet boats that trap the turtles during their migrating season near the coasts of Peru and Chile, both nations that have giant fishing industries.
"Seven or eight years ago, we were counting 100 turtles a night," said park guide Danilo Campos. "Only 28 came out the entire year last year."
Coupled with potential development along the beach, the results could be disastrous.
Randall Arauz, the founder and director of Costa Rican environmental organization Programa Restauracion de Tortugas Marinas (PRETOMA), said protecting the turtles on Costa Rican soil is easier than stopping the longline and gillnet boats in the eastern and southern Pacific waters, an international problem. "What the fishers catch on these longlines are the reproductive...
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