Sea Turtle Recovery Action Plan for Barbados - WIDECAST

Barbados Sea Turtles …
ments that the protection of regionally depleted species, including sea turtles, is a priority.
Barbados played an important role in the adoption of the new SPAW Protocol and its Annexes,
having attended both the January 1990 and June 1991 Conferences, but Government has not yet
ratified the Protocol. It is the recommendation of this Recovery Action Plan that Barbados ratify
the SPAW Protocol with its Annexes at the earliest possible opportunity.
4.33 Subregional sea turtle management
To establish whether nearby countries share with Barbados a common stock of sea
turtles, especially hawksbill and green turtles, will require a cooperative effort amongst nations
to tag juvenile and adult turtles. The extensive travels of adult green turtles are especially well
known in the Wider Caribbean, in part because of many years of tagging at a large nesting
colony in Tortuguero, Costa Rica (e.g., Carr et al., 1978; Meylan, 1982). It is also known that
juvenile green turtles move from one "developmental habitat" to another, and may travel
thousands of kilometres during the decade(s) of adolescence. Thus it is clear that no one nation
can effectively manage or conserve green sea turtles. Green turtles, especially adults, are
comparatively rare in Barbados. Nesting has never been documented.
Less is known of the movements of hawksbills, but long-distance tag returns are reported
from the Wider Caribbean. For example, Nietschmann (1981) reported hawksbills tagged in
Nicaragua and recaptured in Jamaica and Panama. Carr and Stancyk (1975) reported hawksbills
tagged in Costa Rica and recaptured in the Miskito Cays of Nicaragua. On 20 July 1990, a
juvenile hawksbill (74 cm SCL) tagged six months before at the Biological Reserve of Atol das
Rocas in Brazil, was captured and killed in Dakar, Senegal. The distance traveled was at least
2,300 miles (Marcovaldi and Filippini, 1991). Relatively recent tagging projects implemented in
Antigua, the U. S. Virgin Islands, and Caribbean Mexico will undoubtedly provide additional
data in the future, as, hopefully, will tag returns from turtles tagged here in Barbados.
A joint hawksbill tagging programme involving at least Barbados, St. Lucia, St. Vincent
and the Grenadines, and Grenada would contribute greatly to our understanding of the stock
structure of hawksbills in the Wider Caribbean, and strengthen conservation efforts in the area.
WIDECAST promotes such cooperative, international approaches to sea turtle conservation, and
would offer technical support to such a project. Cooperative tagging projects are a priority in
Appendix I, "Expansion of the Sea Turtle Project in Barbados". It is also the recommendation of
this Recovery Action Plan that Barbados participate in regional efforts to define sea turtle stocks
using mtDNA or other proven genetic analysis techniques.
With regard to the few seasonally occurring leatherbacks, it is certain that they travel
widely amongst nations. There are several records of leatherbacks tagged on Caribbean beaches
found later in New England (e.g., Pritchard, 1973, 1976; Lambie, 1983; Boulon et al., 1988), and
studies of the rate and composition of barnacle colonization on Caribbean-nesting females
corroborate the notion that these turtles embark from temperate latitudes on their way to tropical
nesting beaches (Eckert and Eckert, 1988). Gravid individuals can be expected to return to
Barbados at intervals of 2-5 years to repeat the nesting procedure, and in the process will pass
through the waters of many nations. Barbados cannot protect its leatherbacks without the
support of all Caribbean nations.
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