Saving some baby sea turtles in Mexico
I’m on an isolated Mexican beach in the dark, waves crashing, yet all I’m thinking about is the first time I sent each of my kids off to school.
There are no brave 5-year-olds getting on yellow school buses anywhere near this remote spot two hours north of Puerto Vallarta on Mexico’s Pacific Coast, no moms and dads clutching cameras and wiping away tears. The “kids” that have prompted my sweet reverie could fit into a kindergartner’s palm: Baby Olive Ridley sea turtles, more than 600 of them tonight, with our help are taking their first tentative steps from the comfort of their nests and into the world. It’s exciting to watch them slowly make their way to the water’s edge. It’s scary not knowing what will happen to them along their life’s journey.
Welcome to Playa Las Tortugas Turtle Camp. Here on this stretch of beach that’s the nesting habitat for three species of endangered sea turtles, government, private and volunteer efforts have converged during the June-December nesting season to help more of these amazing creatures survive.
More: sun-sentinel.com
Spawning turtles return to Mexico despite threat
More than 100,000 protected Olive Ridley sea turtles have lumbered onto a Mexican beach in recent days to lay some 10 million eggs, just weeks after poachers massacred spawning turtles on the same stretch of sand.
Mexico's environmental protection agency Profepa said on Monday that the turtles had arrived in the 72 hours to Sunday at Escobilla beach in Oaxaca state, a major nesting ground on the Pacific coast that is also a hunting field for poachers who plunder nests and sell the eggs.
Another 25,000 Olive Ridleys arrived on other beaches in Oaxaca last week
Using machetes, poachers killed some 80 protected Olive Ridley sea turtles on Escobilla beach in Oaxaca, Mexico last weekend. The poachers were believed to be after turtle eggs, thought to be an aphrodisiac among locals. The discovery of the massacre was accouned by Profepa, the government's environmental protection agency.
"They killed them with blows to the head and machetes. It is very brutal, the beach would have been covered in blood," said leading environmental campaigner Homero Aridjis in a report from Reuters.
The poachers wasted some 1,800 pounds (800 kg) of valuable turtle flesh which was found on the sand and
Mexico Cracks Open Myth of Sea Turtle Eggs
The fate of endangered sea turtles is entangled in a net of whispers, myths and desires among the piles of fish at the city's enormous Sonora fresh-foods market.
Although some won't admit it, the peddlers and shoppers all know where to buy turtle eggs to eat. Although it's illegal, many buy from the old man who pushes his cart through the aisles of seafood, vegetables and chili peppers.
"Lots of protein. Look at my arms!" said Alfonso Francisco Lopez, 33, a butcher who says he eats four raw turtle eggs every day,
Canada, Mexico Mull Daylight-Saving Plan
Canadians and Mexicans are considering whether to follow U.S. plans to extend daylight-saving time after Congress passed a bill Friday to expand the spring-forward-fall-back scheme by a month.
The energy bill, expected to be signed by President Bush next week, is touted to save energy by expanding daylight-saving time by adding three weeks in the spring and a week in the fall, taking it up to Halloween.
The change is not slated to go into effect until 2007. But officials in Canada worry about being out of sync with U.S. time for airlines, manufacturers, the financial
Gulf of Mexico dolphin deaths reported
Scientists concerned by bottlenose dolphin deaths in the Gulf of Mexico have reportedly asked for the marine mammal equivalent of a disaster declaration.
A 12-member working group of scientists voted Monday to recommend the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration add the dolphin deaths to an "unusual mortality event" the group declared in March for manatees, the Naples (Fla.) Daily News reported Tuesday.
The scientists suspect "red tide" is responsible for the deaths and NOAA is expected to initiate a study of the microscopic algae bloom's effects on dolphins, manatees, sea turtles and even seabirds.
More: upi.com
U.S.-Mexico pact limits lagoon development
They have already passed San Diego: thousands of gray whales making their annual 10,000-mile voyage from feeding grounds in the Arctic circle to the warm winter waters of Baja California.
By now, many of them, the males ahead, the females straggling behind, are arriving in Laguna San Ignacio, one of the world's last underdeveloped lagoons. Here, they will give birth to their young, rear them, and prepare for the long trip back to Alaska in the spring.
The lagoon has been a home to the whales, as well as 221 species of birds, green sea turtles, osprey
Mexico rescues 18 Cubans adrift in flimsy boat
The Mexican Navy rescued 18 Cubans adrift in the Caribbean Sea on a flimsy vessel that was blown off course in a failed bid to reach Florida, the immigration department said on Monday.
A one-year-old baby was among the passengers in the boat, spotted floating off the Isla Mujeres island near the resort of Cancun on Friday.
“A boat spotted them and passed this information on to the Navy, which rescued them,†said a spokeswoman for Mexico’s immigration institute in Cancun.
The Cubans left their homeland on Dec. 27 in a bid to reach the
Eight sent to asylum after horror exorcism killings in Mexico
A judge ordered eight adults committed to a prison psychiatric facility for 40 years on Thursday for the grisly exorcism slayings of a seven-month-old baby and a 13-year-old girl in a remote mountain community in western Mexico.
The brutality of the Dec. 7 killings -- the baby was hacked to death and dismembered while the teenager killed with stones -- has shocked Mexico. Officials say the killers were the victims' own parents, grandparents, uncles and aunts, who had become convinced the girls were demons or possessed by the devil.
They carried out the
Two starved to death in epic Mexico sea voyage
Three Mexicans who survived for nine months as their small fishing boat drifted across the Pacific Ocean tossed two other men overboard after they died of starvation during the journey, officials said on Thursday.
The three were rescued last week by a trawler more than 5,000 miles from Mexicos Pacific Coast fishing village of San Blas, where they left for what was supposed to be a routine shark fishing trip last November.
Stranded on the high seas for nine months, they stayed alive by eating raw birds and fish and drinking rain
Mexico Strikes Oil Under Sea
Mexican President Vicente Fox said Monday that his country had made a new deep-water oil discovery in the Gulf of Mexico that could exceed reserves at the giant offshore field Cantarell, Mexico's largest oil source.
The find, to be formally announced today, is under 3,117 feet of water as well as 13,120 feet of earth, Fox said in an interview.
We have been investing $5 billion a year in exploration, and that work, that investment, is now bearing fruit," Fox said.
Production at Cantarell is expected to decline 6% this year to 1.9 million barrels a day and decline
