ASTORIA, Ore. — They can grow to the size of a golf cart and weigh as much as 2,000 pounds.
They have been on the earth with the dinosaurs. They’ve weathered meteors and ice ages. They’ve adapted again and again.
Leatherback turtles are the largest living turtles in the world but try spotting them in the ocean from an airplane 650 feet up in the air. It’s a big ocean and there are very few Western Pacific leatherbacks left to find.
This summer, a team of researchers with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration based in Astoria spent days up in the sky trying anyway.
They scrutinized the surface of the water from bubble-shaped windows in a specially-designed airplane, tracing precise lines up and down the coast — like mowing the lawn, said Scott Benson, a research fish biologist with NOAA who has focused on endangered leatherback turtles in the Pacific Ocean.
They are trying to fill critical gaps in their knowledge about where and how the endangered turtles use this habitat off the Oregon and Washington state coasts while there is still time. One population of leatherbacks, the Western Pacific leatherbacks, is on a trend towards extinction in the next few decades.
There is a lot of information to catch up on: Surveys for leatherbacks in this area only began in 2022. But the results could help inform wind energy development and valuable regional commercial fisheries.
The work is being funded by the Bureau of Ocean and Energy Management. The agency, part of the U.S. Department of the Interior, is leasing offshore tracts at Coos Bay and Brookings for wind energy development.
It isn’t clear how energy projects might impact the turtles. A goal of the surveys is to help paint a picture of what such projects might mean for the turtles.
The surveys could also help inform work around fisheries in Oregon and Washington as the states look to both reduce the risk of whales and turtles tangling with commercial crabbing gear and protect fishermen from the ramifications of accidentally snagging endangered marine animals.
New regulations adopted by Oregon fishery managers in the last few years changed aspects of the commercial Dungeness crab fishery, like how much gear was allowed in the water late in the season and how far out that gear could be placed. These were attempts to create more of a buffer between whales — specifically endangered humpback whales — and commercial crabbers, limiting the opportunities for the whales to tangle with the gear.
Such entanglements have been on the rise and commercial gear from Oregon commercial gear has been implicated in some instances.
In the background is the possibility of a lawsuit like one that hit California several years ago. That lawsuit, over impacts to whales from commercial fishing activities, was settled in 2019 and now dictates aspects of that state’s commercial Dungeness crab fishery.
In an effort to get ahead of the issue, Oregon has been working towards applying for a federal endangered species act incidental take permit. Such a permit would allow for some degree of impact by the commercial Dungeness fishery to several whale species as well as leatherback turtles. Oregon fishery managers say it is a protection measure for a fishery that already faces many other challenges.
But the state first needs to craft a habitat conservation plan, one that includes leatherback turtles and details ways the state will reduce the risk of entanglement. And Oregon faces the same knowledge gaps as everyone else when it comes to leatherbacks.
“One of the major challenges that we face in developing this plan is the extremely limited information on leatherback sea turtle distribution and habitat use,” said Brittany Harrington, the marine life entanglement project leader for the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife’s Marine Resources program.
For Harrington, the NOAA surveys of leatherbacks are a unique opportunity to learn more about where and when the turtles are off the Oregon Coast.
“Our management approach for both whales and leatherbacks is largely designed around reducing co-occurrences,” Harrington said. In other words: reducing the overlap of fishing activity with the presence of animals the fishery really wants to avoid.
Western Pacific Leatherbacks nest in places like Papua New Guinea and Indonesia and then embark on a long, dangerous migration across the ocean to the Pacific Northwest where they forage for jellyfish.
Benson and the team of NOAA researchers hoped to tag a leatherback with a transmitter. Data gleaned from a tagged animal would be a huge step to answering key questions about the turtles when they are here in the Pacific Northwest.
“What we’re really wanting to find out is how these animals use these nearshore waters in particular,” Benson said.
“Once we are able to put a transmitter on one of these things, then that animal should tell us quite a bit more about where we should be looking and how the animals use the habitat… what kind of environmental conditions are most beneficial for foraging for these creatures,” he said.
No luck this season, however.
They saw plenty of other marine life, including good indicators that turtles could be nearby like the leatherback’s favorite food — a species of jellyfish called brown sea nettle— and the presence of other fish that prey on the same jellies. But no turtles.
The major threat leatherbacks face is human. In particular, when they are snagged as bycatch in fisheries targeting other species.
Benson noted that while U.S. fisheries have made changes to try to avoid turtles and minimize injury to them if they are caught accidentally, these same protections are not at play in many international fisheries.
Western Pacific leatherbacks are considered a “species in the spotlight,” a species NOAA is highlighting because it is one of several most likely to go extinct in just a few decades.
“At this point, we’re trying to learn as much as we can from the animals,” Benson said. “There’s always the hope that recovery will be possible.”
From his perspective though — and trying to find a realistic balance — he believes “the only way that population is going to be able to recover is if all the fishing nations in the Pacific Ocean get together and agree on some kind of techniques and policies that will be able to keep leatherbacks safe during (their migrations).”
“And,” he added, “that’s a really tall bar.”