10/06/2025
Read our most recent blog post! Don't have time, we've summarized the main points for you.
https://www.turtleskingston.com/blog/turtle-conservation-should-we-focus-on-adults-or-hatchlings
Conservation of any animal has a lot of questions related to how, where, when, and even why. For turtles, we know some of the things we need to do include:
1. protect their habitat,
2. decrease the adult mortality, and
3. increase hatchling recruitment (aka number of hatchling turtles that survive and have a chance to make it to adulthood).
But, which of these actions will make the biggest impact?
The KEY but financially difficult approach is to protect adult turtles as turtle populations are more sensitive to the loss of an adult turtle. Even without the influence of humans, hatchling predation rates are high in the wild (50-80%) and adult turtles can take decades (up to 59 years) to create one adult reproducing offspring.
Thus, if we can protect just one adult turtle we can make a big impact in turtle populations!
Protecting hatchlings is still important and arguably easier as well as a great way to get public engagement! This is particularly important around human populations as predation rates of turtle nests are closer to 100%.
