For the tenth consecutive year, the alliance between the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) and Fundación Telmex Telcel released 360 olive ridley sea turtle hatchlings (Lepidochelys olivacea) on the beaches of Acapulco, within the framework of the Open Mexican Tennis.
Tennis players, sports event attendees and volunteers participated in the release, with the aim of raising awareness about the importance of conserving marine species for the benefit of the ecosystem and the planet.
“The work of the Alliance goes beyond the conservation effort for the recovery of the species, it has also become a work of environmental education. Carrying out the releases allows people from cities or communities to have contact with the small sea turtles that have just hatched. At that moment, a connection is generated and the participants know that, by being part of their journey to the sea, they are giving one of the longest-living marine beings on our planet the opportunity to live,” said Eduardo Nájera, Coordinator of Marine Landscapes. of the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF)
Between Wednesday, February 23 and Friday, February 25, the attendees took part in six releases on the beach in front of the Princess Mundo Imperial hotel, after listening to a talk given by the biologist Eduardo Nájera, in which he highlighted the work carried out by the Alliance in the rescue of nests, in the temperature monitoring of these to analyze the balance of females and males that are born on Mexican coasts, as well as the use of satellite technology to monitor the movements of these sea turtles and help in their conservation.
During the first of these releases, Nájera shared that Mexico receives six of the seven species of sea turtle on the planet, all of them in different risk categories.
For his part, Marcos Linares, deputy director of Marketing, Crossmedia & Content at Telcel, commented that the 360 released turtles are added to the 624,025,000 hatchlings protected in nine years by the Playa Larga turtle camp, under the direction of marine ecologist Víctor Verdejo with the support of the Alliance.
“The team carries out research, protection, preservation and conservation activities for sea turtles. In 24 years of protection, the camp has released 2,193,478 pups, of which 97,500 were released in 2021,” he noted.
Of all the turtles that are born, only one in a thousand manages to reach adult life. Threats such as bycatch in fishing, illegal hunting, the poaching of their nests, light pollution from large buildings and plastic pollution, among others, put them at risk of disappearing.
The study of sea turtles through satellite tracking has contributed to today knowing that, in the case of nesting hawksbill turtles, they travel from Banderas Bay to the Marías Islands.
“Our goal is to confirm nesting in Islas Marías to increase the number of well-managed nesting beaches. Currently, other success stories in the Mexican Pacific are the Punta Mita, Costa Careyes and Isla Ixtapa nesting beaches, which produce about 4,000 eggs a year,” shared Eduardo Nájera.
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