A recent comment on CTURTLE got me thinking about how much more popular sea turtles have become with the general public and in the press. Then I realized that I can actually quantify it, at least somewhat.

SEATURTLE.ORG started aggregating sea turtle related news in 2001. This started out as manual searches, but now involves automated searching of the google news feed every hour. There is a reason for this automation. Before 2003 you could expect to find only a couple of stories a month about sea turtles. Today there are a dozen or more new news stories every day. So many that manually hunting them all down would be a near impossible task.

Obviously this incredible increase is not only because sea turtles have increased in popularity. A significant reason for this increase is that more news outlets add their content to the web with each passing day. This is a global phenomenon, one that allowed seaturtle.org to begin aggregating Spanish language sea turtle news stories last year. And more recently we have begun aggregating sea turtle news in Portugues and French as well.

It is also worth a mention that if you are interested in a more frequent and unfiltered picture of world sea turtle news you can subscribe to the seaturtle.org News Tracker.

We hope that you find this a useful resource. There is a lot going on in the world of sea turtles and this is a great way to stay up to date with the latest happenings. As always, we welcome your comments, questions or suggestions about this and other resources on seaturtle.org.

Posted by Michael Coyne at 04:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Posted by Michael Coyne at 11:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth just came out on iTunes.

Do you want to scare yourself?

Read some of the customer reviews posted to iTunes about the movie. You will get a good sense of why conservation is so hard!

Posted by Michael Coyne at 08:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Public Service Announcement

Posted by Michael Coyne at 09:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Comments from US first lady Laura Bush at Marine Debris Initiative announcement:

Full text available here:
http://www.bymnews.com/news/newsDetails.php?id=17613

We became very fond of these funny little birds that we watched, but we also saw the carcasses of a lot of these infant Laysan Albatross, because when their parents fish, they fish on the surface for squid, and that's where the plastic floats. And so they eat plastic and then feed their babies, regurgitate this plastic that they've eaten.
So we would see the little carcasses, and when we sort of looked in them, you would see cigarette lighters and toothbrushes and bottle caps and toys -- toy cars or little tires from toys -- and every single type of plastic that we all know we use every day.
And this is not from falling off of a boat. I mean, this isn't plastic that fell overboard, although certainly a lot of debris in the ocean is fishing gear that did fall from boats or was tossed from boats. But this could be a cigarette lighter somebody dropped in a curb, you know, on their street somewhere in the United States or anywhere in the world, and it slowly washed through the drains out into the oceans, and then finally ended up at these Northwestern Hawaiian Islands.
So that reminded me, when I saw these little Laysan Albatross carcasses, baby carcasses, of how what we do here can affect every single part of our world, and why it's so important for us to make sure children know that. And that's one of the great things about what we just saw with these children inside. They were going through debris that somebody had picked up, marine debris. And of course, a lot of it was Styrofoam buoys, real marine debris that happens because of marine economy. But a lot of it were just things that people had dropped somewhere -- a lot of plastic, a lot of wrappers from -- plastic wrappers from paper, a lot of cans, a lot of beer cans. (Laughter.) That's what they got to go through.
But it really is very important that state and local governments and industry and academia and non-profit organizations and our federal institutions work together to make sure we reduce and remove debris in the marine environment.

Posted by Michael Coyne at 09:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)