Wednesday, April 25, 2007

great turtle race

i found this interesting website about the conservation of leatherback turtles. do take a look and support, by voting, for your favourite leatherback turtle in the great turtle race. the leatherbacks will swim from costa rica to the galapagos islands. they even have a live update on the website every ten minutes to see the current leaderboard!



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these magnificant creatures used to swarm the playa grande beach in the hundreds. their population spanned throughout the pacific region from costa rica to malaysia in 1990. now you have to wait for days just to see one coming up the beach to lay eggs. the turtles in the asian side of the pacific ocean are practically extincted.

as an adult, their gigantic size makes them almost invulnerable to any natural predator. however, their numbers are dwindling extremely quickly due to human activities. they ate plastic bags thrown into the water by humans which they mistake as jellyfish, their favourite food. check out the difference between the two, and imagine looking at them in the water hundreds of meters deep:



in addition, they get accidentely caught by large commercial fishing nets easily and left to die on the fishing docks. the consequences?



the race slogan is a pun with deep implications: "they are going faster than you think"

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