as Vice Minister, and in numerous Conservation NGO positions. Sr. Boza is fondly referred to in Costa Rica as the father of the National Parks system and was a driving force urging us to work in Costa Rica and help conserve sea turtles. The National parks in Costa Rica are one of the leading ecotourist destinations in the world and are renowned for their diversity, beauty and strong management by MINAE. We have Provided the data to MINAE needed to develop a new National Park "Parque Marino Las Baulas" to help protect leatherback sea turtles along the Pacific coast in the Guanacaste Provence on Playa Grande (photo #1). Over the past eight years we have had over 300 Earthwatch volunteers, 20 graduate students and numerous undergraduates from the USA and Costa Rica work with us on the scientific and conservation projects that have resulted in over 30 publications  in scientific journals. As a matter of fact one Costa Rican student Sr. Rodney Pietra Chacon, who did his graduate research working with us and his Costa Rican Professors from the National University of Costa Rica on Playa Langosta, is now the Park Director.

To see a brief National Geographic video on this project, click here.

   Sadly over the past 11 years we have watched the rapid decline of the leatherbacks from a population that was about 1,350 female nesters per season to about 130 - 140 individual turtles who have nested there the past three years.  For a more detailed data go to our web page at http://www.coas.drexel.edu/environ/costa-rica/.  This decline is the result of over 15 years of almost complete harvest of the eggs laid by returning females and the loss of many nesting beaches to development for hotels, resorts, and private homes (see Figure 1 and photo # 2 of poacher on horseback). We have also observed a greater than 40% mortality in the returning adult female population over the last eight years. To be sure that these female who have not returned are  not just nesting elsewhere, we have conducted aerial surveys and checked beaches all along the Costa Rican coastline and found that there are few beaches left where the leatherbacks still nest. The situation is the same all along the Central American coastline from Mexico to Panama. At a recent meeting in January 1999 I spoke with Ms Laura Sarti, a Mexican leatherback researcher, who relayed to me some really depressing news. She reported that on the Pacific beaches of Mexiquillo where there were approximately 1,000  female leatherbacks nesting per year ten years ago now there was only one female who came ashore to lay only two nests. Leatherback turtles and others are also caught on long line fishery hooks. We, using satellite telemetry, followed the

that US shrimp fishermen would not be undercut by cheap shrimp caught without the use of these TED devices. The TED (Figure of TED) is simply a gate in the net that allows for large marine species to escape from inside the nets. If these turtles, marlin, tuna, and other large marine species are dragged in the nets without these escape routes they are caught along with the shrimp and damaged or drowned in the nets and just dumped overboard. The foreign importers of shrimp argued that the USA TED law was forcing foreign fleets to comply with USA laws and  restricted free trade. The WTO ruled in October 1998 that this US TED law was an infringement on free trade and see the Earth Island web page at http://www.earthisland.org/strp/deathsentence.html to check out the full details of this ruling and the arguments made concerning this case. The bottom line is that sea turtles will be needlessly killed because of the US appetite for shrimp. Shrimp fishing is one of the most inefficient fisheries with 10 - 30 lbs of so-called bycatch that must be dumped dead overboard for every 1 pound of shrimp caught. These shrimp fishing practices along with the long line fisheries especially off the Pacific Coast of Central America seem to have