Saving a Sacred Turtle: A Guna Community Strives to Keep the World’s Largest Sea Turtle from the Brink of Extinction

“Hay vivas!” they exclaimed together in Spanish to a group of local Guna volunteers and scientists visiting from Panama City. In English, this meant, “There are live ones!” There, in the palms of the women’s hands, several 2-inch turtles barely moved after nearly suffocating in their nest.

“Agua, Agua!,” someone shouted, requesting water to help revive the hatchlings. Quickly the group sprang into action. One of the volunteers filled a shallow bucket of sea water. Another then dampened the hatchlings and rubbed their stomachs to wake them. Meanwhile, Crespo and Veelenturf continued to rescue six more. As the little ones regained their strength, all but one instinctively began to flutter their tiny flippers and scoot around broken sandals, tires and discarded water bottles entangled in mounds of sargassum seaweed, determined to reach the water’s edge. Crespo safeguarded the weakest hatchling in a small bucket of sand. She would bring it back with her to her family’s home and care for it until it was strong enough to swim.

Relatives of the Sea

Leatherbacks are the largest of the world’s seven sea turtle species. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, adult leatherbacks can be on average between 5 and 6 feet long and weigh between 750 and 1,000 pounds. Unlike other sea turtles, these do not have hard shells. Their tough, leathery carapace marked by seven longitudinal ridges allows them to dive deeper than any other turtle and most marine mammals, more than 3,000 feet. They are highly migratory animals and can be found throughout the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans.

According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), leatherback populations are declining globally. The northwest Atlantic leatherback, which nests in Armila, is classified as endangered, meaning it is facing possible extinction. Increased air temperatures due to global warming are frying the turtles’ eggs and causing sea levels to rise, washing away critical nesting habitat. Many turtles drown in fishing nets, while others are trapped by plastic debris or struck by boats. In some places, their eggs are illegally harvested, sold and eaten.

Yet that’s typically not the case in Armila, a fishing village of about 900 people located near the Colombian border and at the mouth of the Armila River as it flows into the Caribbean Sea. Here, leatherbacks are sacred. According to Guna stories told through generations, the turtles once lived as humans until a great tsunamilike wave swept them into the ocean, where they were transformed into reptiles. “The turtles are our departed sisters and brothers lost at sea,” said Crespo. “We need to protect them so they don’t go extinct.”

The Guna people make up one of Panama’s seven Indigenous groups. Scholars differ about their origins, though oral histories say the people migrated from Colombia sometime after the 16th century. Today, around 60,000 Guna live along Panama’s Caribbean coast and on about 50 of its islands that make up the Guna Yala archipelago, also known as the San Blas islands. The Guna have an intimate connection with nature and take great pride in having lived harmoniously with the turtles for thousands of years. “We can’t maltreat the turtles because our grandparents say the turtles feel the same as other sentient beings. They feel pain, fatigue,” said Desidelia Martinez, a Guna mother of six children and coconut farmer from Armila.

Last spring, Martinez joined Crespo, Veelenturf and a small group of Guna community members in launching the first long-term sea turtle monitoring project in Armila. Proyecto Yaug Galu (Sacred Turtle Project) was initiated by Veelenturf and Crespos’s father, Ignacio Crespo, with the goal of using proven scientific methods of tracking the turtles’ movements and behavior to gain a better understanding of how to protect and conserve the animals and, in effect, Guna culture.

“By protecting the leatherback sea turtles on their nesting beach, in coastal waters and out on the high seas, we are giving the populations the best chance to recover in the decades to come and the community of Armila the best chance to maintain their cultural heritage,” said Veelenturf. 

Ensuring Turtles’ Rights 

Originally from Massachusetts, Veelenturf has been living and working with local communities in Panama to protect sea turtles since 2019. In 2021, she drafted an article for a national sea turtle conservation bill proposed by Panatortugas, a Panama based sea turtle conservation network, that grants the reptiles legal rights to live in a healthy environment, free from pollution and any other harmful human behavior that could jeopardize the animals and their natural habitats. The bill gained support from Panamanian lawmakers, including Petita Ayarza, the first Indigenous Guna woman to be elected as a representative in the National Assembly. The bill was passed into law last year; it will go into effect in 2024.

“We are spiritually connected to the turtles. For that reason, we have to protect them,” said Ayarza, a member of parliament in the National Assembly of Panama. As many of her fellow Guna people believe, she said, “If we don’t, the world will not survive.”

As legal rights holders, sea turtles will soon be able to be represented in court by any Panamanian citizen that thinks the animals’ rights are being violated. But to effectively implement the law more collaboration is needed amongst scientists, research institutions, universities and Indigenous communities. “We need more data to enforce the law, and we have to respect the Indigenous community’s turtle,” said Marino Eugenio Abrego, who heads the department of coastal and marine resources for Panama’s Ministry of Environment. He has developed a longstanding relationship with the people of Armila over many years.

With Abrego’s help, Veelenturf sought permission from Armila’s top spiritual authorities and leaders, known as “Saglas,” to join forces with a group of volunteers from the community to begin attaching satellite tags to some of the nesting leatherbacks. This would allow them to track the animals’ movements throughout Panama, Colombia and beyond in real time. The information collected could be used to propose designated shipping lanes that would avoid the turtles’ migratory pathways or stop coastal construction projects that could destroy their nesting habitat, said Veelenturf.

Additionally, she began mentoring and providing financial support to two University of Panama students studying marine biology, including Wiguidili Crespo, as they conducted research on the nesting habits of leatherbacks in Armila. When she graduates, Crespo will become Armila’s first marine biologist, a feat that previously felt largely unattainable for women in her community, according to Proyecto Yaug Galu volunteer Desidelia Martinez. “Before, in our tradition, women were not allowed to work with turtles,” said Martinez as she hand-sewed leatherback designs onto a traditional Guna textile called a mola while outside her earthen floored home in Armila. Traditionally, molas are made to compliment Guna women’s colorful blouses and are considered a symbol of national identity. Nowadays, many women like Martinez also make mola wall hangings with the geometric nature-inspired designs to sell to tourists.

As a child, Martinez was fascinated by the massive reptiles called “yaug suersuered” in her Guna language, Dulegaya. She dreamed of becoming a marine biologist to study the female turtles that emerged from Grandmother Ocean, or “Muu Bi-li,” to nest on her community’s beach each year from February to July. But her family didn’t have the money to put her through school past the seventh grade. For fun, she would measure the turtles with a wooden yardstick that belonged to her father. She had seen him do the same while working as a carpenter. When he first discovered she was spending time with the turtles, Martinez said he forbade her from continuing.

“There was a myth that if we got close to the turtle something bad would happen,” Martinez said. There were tales of women having miscarriages after encountering a turtle, or fishermen being dragged out to sea if they meddled with its eggs. But now, she said,“Things are changing.”

In 2013, Morrison Mast, a Fulbright fellow from Washington, D.C., visited Armila to train community members to collect basic data on the reptiles. According to a scientific paper published in 2007 in the journal Biological Conservation, the village’s beach makes up part of one of the four largest nesting sites for leatherbacks in the world. Mast was able to convince Martinez’s father to allow her to accompany him on early morning beach patrols to count the number of bulldozerlike tracks etched into the sand by the turtles’ flippers as they shuffled to and from their nesting spot.

Since then, Martinez has kept meticulous, handwritten notes about the number of nesting females that have laid their eggs in Armila and the hatchlings she’s helped rescue from preying birds, crabs and dogs. According to her several years of data collected up until the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic (during which community members were not permitted to go to the beach), as many as 50 to 70 turtles used to come ashore each night during peak nesting season. This begins in May, which the Guna call “Yaug Nii,” or the “month of the turtle.” Last May, the small group of Guna volunteers from Proyecto Yaug Galu considered themselves lucky if they encountered four of the giants in a night. Sometimes they saw none. 

Turtle Protectors and Trackers

Martinez and Crespo refer to themselves as “Tortugueros,” a Spanish word many turtle conservationists throughout Latin America use to describe their work as “turtle protectors.” It’s a tiresome job that requires dedication and hard physical labor, said Crespo’s father, Ignacio Crespo. But nothing stops them. “For Tortugueros, the time doesn’t matter. It’s a passion,” he said.

In Armila, the project usually has about six community volunteers working each night during nesting season. They carry thermoses of hot black coffee as they forgo nights of sleep, trudging back and forth along nearly 3 miles of beach in the dark until sunrise, carefully navigating glass bottles, fishing nets, rusty trash cans and even the occasional refrigerator washed ashore via strong currents and fierce waves that sometimes prevent anyone from entering or leaving the remote community. The coastal village can only be reached by boat or a 3-hour, steep, muggy hike through the jungle from the nearest town, Puerto Obaldia. They wear long-sleeve rash guards emblazoned with their project’s leatherback logo and neck gaiters they pull up and over their noses to protect their face from wind and mosquitos. When rain suddenly downpours, they don plastic ponchos and continue on their mission.

As white light confuses the turtles and deters them from nesting, the volunteers use red-light headlamps to pierce the dark and search for moving shadows along the shoreline or fresh tracks ascending from the water’s edge toward the coconut grove managed by Martinez’s family. Sometimes they rely only on the moonlight, or their dog named Dog, who has become adept at sniffing out the reptiles and their nests, to guide them as they follow the sandy track to a nesting female. There, they wait in silence and darkness until she falls into a trance-like state as she begins to lay her eggs.

On one such night last spring, Martinez and another teenage volunteer in training laid on their stomachs to peer in between the turtles’ back flippers and diligently count each billiard-ball-size egg falling into its nest. Typically, leatherbacks lay around 100 eggs, although Veelenturf said only about half of them will hatch.

As the eggs are being counted, Crespo and her research partner, Lineylis Ríos, measure the length and width of the turtle’s shell. They note several pinkish scars on the turtle’s front flippers, and a chunk taken out of one of its paddle-shaped back flippers. The freshest ones were likely obtained during mating; a shark bite might have been the latter.

Veelenturf then prepares to teach the group how to tag a turtle, a way of collecting data on the turtles’ post-nesting travels. Northwestern Atlantic leatherbacks can swim more than 10,000 miles between their nesting grounds in the Caribbean and open ocean foraging sites along the northeastern United States and throughout Nova Scotia, the Gulf of Mexico, northwestern Europe and northwestern Africa. Each animal can consume nearly a ton of jellyfish a day, which has earned the reptile much respect amongst the Guna. Jellyfish eat fish eggs, depleting the Guna’s primary livelihood. “We live from fishing,” said Martinez. “If there are no more turtles, or if we harm the turtles, more jellyfish will come.”

Before Veelenturf begins the tagging process, she conducts a personal ritual taught to her by one of her project partners, Ramiselia Ramírez, a marine biologist from Achutupu, another Guna community located about a two-hour boat ride from Armila. She talks to the turtle. “It’s important to connect with their spirit and speak to them and let them know our intention to protect them; even if we’re tagging them, which might cause a small amount of pain,” said Veelenturf.

The team uses three methods to track each nesting turtle’s future movements. First, they inject a Passive Integrated Transponder, known as a PIT tag, into one of the animal’s front flippers using a needlelike syringe. This tag contains an internal microchip. The next time a researcher comes across this turtle, they can use an electronic reading device to scan the microchip and learn where else it’s been. Not all researchers have this technology, however. So team members also use a heavy-duty, stapler-looking device to attach an external metal tag with a unique identification number to one of the turtle’s back flippers. A volunteer carefully records this number along with other vitals such as the turtle’s size, location, scars and behavior, all of which can help identify it later.

Over the course of several weeks, Veelenturf demonstrates how to equip some of the turtles with satellite tags, each of which costs $3,400 dollars. The small computer looking devices with little antennas are carefully tethered to the turtle’s carapace using thin wire looped through tiny holes drilled through the shell and silicone putty. Each turtle outfitted with the expensive tag is given a name. The first one was called Armila.

Once attached, the tags send periodic signals to orbiting satellites. Veelenturf then downloads the information transmitted and produces colorful maps of each turtle’s movements. Other information, such as the turtle’s depth and speed can also be captured. Of the eight turtles tagged in Armila with this technology, Veelenturf’s maps show many stayed close to Armila for several months during last spring’s nesting season, proving the area is vital to leatherbacks, both on and offshore. Since then, some have migrated north to Canada; others have been found in the Gulf of Mexico.

Mitigating Trash Minefields

Veelenturf hopes the tracking data will be used to help the Guna people of Armila decide how they would like to protect the turtles. Perhaps, they will create a protected zone of sorts to ensure the turtles are able to nest safely and move about in the water without the risk of being struck by boats or getting caught in fishing gear.

She is also hopeful the data may be used to procure financial resources to provide stipends to the volunteers as well as governmental support to clean up their beaches. Armila has no waste treatment plan. Much of the garbage is burned or left on the beach to be washed away with the tides. Strong currents also carry foreign garbage onto their shore. “I’ve never seen so much trash as I have this last year on the beach of Armila,” said Igua Crespo, Wiguidili Crespo’s brother, who also serves as one of the project’s volunteers.

By May of last year, it became common for Crespo and the rest of the team to witness leatherbacks trying to shuffle across a carpet of plastic water bottles as they searched for a safe place to nest, only to watch them turn back to the sea without laying their eggs because they could find no such place. On several occasions he worked alongside his sister and other volunteers to help guide nesting turtles back to the water after being disoriented or trapped by trash. One night he spotted several hatchlings trapped in an overturned plastic bucket. Sometimes, he said, so much plastic is trapped in the nest, the babies cannot escape. “Sometimes they all die,” he said.

In the future, Crespo hopes Proyecto Yaug Galu will have the funds to start and maintain a hatchery where they could transfer leatherback eggs to ensure they are protected from garbage, predators and the rising tides that are quickly eroding the beach and flooding the nests. For now, he said, they have to do what they can with the resources they have. “We have to do a complete cleaning of the beach,” he said. “We need to involve everyone.”

One way to engage the community was to host a celebration. Since 2010, Crespo’s father, Ignacio Crespo, has organized an annual sea turtle festival every May. Prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, tourists, neighboring communities and local reporters gathered in Armila to watch traditional Guna dances and listen to songs about the sacred turtle. Recently, United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) recognized the festival as one of the best safeguarding practices for cultural and ecological preservation.

This past May, Ignacio Crespo planned to revive the tradition, but a local malaria outbreak prevented invited guests from entering the community. Only Veelenturf and a small team of accompanying scientists and government officials from Panama City attended, along with a visiting muralist from Colombia. Over the course of several days, children drew leatherback designs with sticks in the sandy alleyways traversing their community. They collected scrap wood from the beach that they used as canvases for their own paintings of turtles, inspired by Colombian artist Hernan Jurado Quintero’s mural of a leatherback swimming through the waves of time along one of the village school walls. 

On the final day, local students joined the Proyecto Yaug Galu team in a beach cleanup. Supplied with gloves and garbage bags, they scrambled to load as much trash into the bags as possible. By sunset, a small section of beach had been cleared in front of their homes. Then they gathered in front of the mural. One by one, the artist painted their hands, which they stamped along the wall as a signature of commitment to safeguarding their leatherback brothers and sisters for generations to come.