Loggerhead sea turtle deaths and strandings rose in 2018, the year President Andrés Manuel López Obrador took office, and have remained dizzyingly high.
At least 329 of the turtles were found dead between 2015 and 2017 in and around the Gulf of Ulloa, a prime Pacific fishing area off the coast of Mexico’s Baja California peninsula.
The new report says that “Mexico’s response states that fishing is not the main cause of sea turtle mortality.” It says Mexico contends that causes include ”the presence of predators; collisions with boats; ingestion of anthropogenic waste or toxic pollutants; the nutritional conditions of specimens and populations, and various metabolic or infectious diseases.”
While experts acknowledge that a number of factors contribute to sea turtle deaths, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says that “bycatch in fishing gear remains the biggest threat facing loggerheads.”
Fishing, unlike diseases or climate change, is something humans can directly control through the use of sea turtle-excluder devices on nets, a kind of escape opening required in relevant areas of the United States.
The report found Mexican authorities haven’t filed any criminal complaints nor sought to prosecute fishing boats for killing turtles.
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