The Cocos Island Sea Turtle Satellite Transmitter Tagging Project

By Author: Victor Krumm
Total Articles: 17
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A Costa Rica satellite tracking expedition recently got underway at Cocos Island to study migrations of its green sea turtle and hawksbill visitors.

Marine scientists travel Costa Rica open waters for at least 30 hours in their pursuit of migration habits about these ancient marine animals. Imagine what they do as a kind of working Costa Rica vacation that, hopefully, will contribute to saving these marvelous marine reptiles now sadly endangered in much of their range.

Cocos Island, once described by the famed oceanographer, Jacque Cousteau, as the most beautiful island he had ever visited, lies some 340 miles off the shore of Costa Rica, almost halfway to the Galapagos Islands.

It was not the pretty palm trees or beaches that captured the imagination of the Captain. Its beauty lies off its shores, under water, in a place that Costa Ricans have voted one of the Seven Wonders of Cost Rica.

Cocos Island has fired the imagination of novelists, seafarers, and pirates for at least 300 years and today it is probably the most famous island in the world.

Everybody knows about ...
... it, whether living in Bangalore, India, or Anchorage, Alaska, the Steppes of Russia or the Sahara Desert.

Say what? You don't know it? Well, perhaps you know it by its more famous name: Jurassic Park. That's what author Michael Crichton called this remote island, which he used as its setting.

Or, maybe, when you were younger, you knew it as Treasure Island.

130 years before there was a Captain Jack Sparrow, another swashbuckling pirate, Long John Silver, captured the public imagination. Some people think Cocos served as inspiration for that Robert Lewis Stevenson tale.

However, setting aside tall tales, this little island was a popular Costa Rica hideout for real pirates. Well off the sailing lanes of the English pirate hunting fleets, it offered a safe sanctuary and an abundance of coconuts, a favorite ingredient in pirate drink.

It also was a great place to bury treasure and, indeed, even to this day, two fabulous booties, the Devonshire and Lima Treasures, may still be buried there.

Cocos Island is considered by many scuba divers the best place on the planet for diving with large marine animals.

There is an incredible variety of fish and marine mammals, from tuna to toadfish, and everything in between, not to mention porpoises and whales, in its fertile waters.

Sea turtles have been swimming the oceans of the world since the age of dinosaurs. Imagine Tyrannosaurus Rex feeding on them 200 million years ago when they landed ashore to lay their eggs.

These ancient beings roam all the oceans of the world except the Arctic and Antarctic.

Once, the numbers of the half dozen species of sea turtles were so huge that mariners, lost in the fog, found land by listening for the sounds of sea turtles paddling towards nesting grounds.

Unfortunately, no more. Today, our unrestrained development of beaches and plundering of their nests have put them at risk.

Millions were slaughtered in South America to make expensive shoes for Europeans.

Huge pack caravans carried off billions of eggs from the beaches of Mexico. Even today eggs are poached to be sold in taverns as aphrodisiacs.

However, many countries around the world, aided by researchers and conservationists have become alarmed about terribly declining numbers of marine turtles.

Jacque Yves Cousteau once presciently remarked: "If we go on the way we have, the fault is our greed and if we are not willing to change, we will disappear from the face of the globe, to be replaced by the insect.."

But, conservation organizations have not abandoned hope and are working to turn around the decline turtle populations.

Conservation organizations are now tagging pelagic turtles like the green sea turtle in far-away places like Cocos Island. Some turtles are fitted with flipper tags while others bear satellite transmitters to help monitor their movements and it has been discovered that some species roam across thousands and thousands of miles of oceans, from tropical waters to the deep waters off Newfoundland, Canada.

Perhaps it is not too late for these survivors.

We cannot undo the past but the future is not yet written.
About the author: Vic Krumm lives in sunny Costa Rica. Check out his very beautiful website Costa Rica Vacations and see why Costa Rica Tourism is world-renowned.