Help to Release 5000 Sea Turtles in Guatemala!

Greetings from your friends at ARCAS. 

Here at the ARCAS Hawaii Park, we are in the middle of the off season, with only occasional sea turtle nesting. We usually take advantage of this lull in our sea turtle work to rebuild or make improvements to our wildlife rehabilitation infrastructure and hatcheries, and to focus on our mangrove and community development activities. We are currently repairing the shading on our hatcheries and will be replacing the roof on our main research and education rancho.  (Things here on the Pacific coast of Guatemala don’t last long with all the sun, salt and wind!) 

In December, we finished and distributed our Annual Report and Sea Turtle Situational Analysis.  I hope you received a copy.  If not, you can find it on our publications page:  https://arcasguatemala.org/who-we-are/arcas-publications/  2021 was a really good year for the olive ridley, with 2,431 nesting crawls recorded on the Hawaii beach! Unfortunately, things continue to look bleak for the leatherback, and we didn’t receive a nest of this highly endangered species in 2021.  We are collating the 2022 sea turtle crawl count data and hope to have an updated Situational Analysis in April.       

We also supported local communities by hiring local guides and boatmen (the majority ex-poachers)  to conduct turtle and mangrove patrols.  With the help of our friends at the Ocean Conservancy, Semillas por el Oceano and 4Ocean, we carried out a Coastal Marine Festival and beach clean-ups, mangrove reforestations and educational activities with local communities.  However, due to the Covid pandemic, we continue to receive few volunteers and were only able to incubate 8,104 olive ridley sea turtle eggs in 2022, far below our historic, pre-pandemic levels of 30,000 – 50,000.  With your help, we hope to improve these numbers in 2023!  The sea turtle season starts in July, so please consider donating or volunteering to save our sea turtle friends.

Thank you, 

ARCAS