Preventing the Extinction of East Pacific Leatherbacks
The East Pacific leatherback population that nests in Costa Rica and Mexico is considered critically endangered. Without concerted action to recover this population, it is likely to reach functional extinction by 2080.
Upwell is combining conservation approaches to increase juvenile survival through rewilding while also attempting to decrease mortality by reducing fisheries bycatch. We enthusiastically support all interventions advocated by the Eastern Pacific Leatherback Conservation Network (LaudOPO) to promote population recovery by reducing mortality from fisheries bycatch, protecting nesting beaches and increasing hatchling production, and promoting and strengthening implementation of regional actions through existing networks and instruments. We are also advancing rewilding methods such as captive rearing techniques used to recover other critically endangered species (e.g., Kemp’s ridley sea turtles, California condors, etc.) to overcome high mortality in early life stages until wild populations stabilize.
Our population viability assessment shows ex situ methods like rewilding could effectively augment existing interventions to save East Pacific leatherbacks from extirpation. In a perfect world, ex situ interventions like rewilding would not be necessary, but the unmitigated challenge of reducing bycatch to the radically low levels needed to prevent extirpation of the East Pacific population absent complementary ex situ actions warrants “out-of-the-box” thinking.
