Plage Blanche
“Plage Blanche” (= the white beach) in southern Morocco has the most incredible beach topography I have ever seen. It is simply the Sahara undulating its way down to the tideline. The coastline was shrouded in mist when I visited, giving Plage Blanche an additional surrealistic appeal.
Pasteur and Bons in 1960 referred to extensive nesting by loggerheads and possibly greens on this beach (their information came from personal communications from officers of Indigenous Affairs). I was very keen to verify their information and to collect tissue samples to determine if some of the haplotypes seen in juvenile loggerheads in the eastern Atlantic could be traced to this region. However, getting to this beach through the harsh Saharan terrain was not simple. 
We were able to get to only two access points to this beach with great difficulty, and only after driving for several hours on a bumpy track, getting lost in the desert, and stopping to ask the occasional Tuareg herding his camels for directions.
I surveyed only a small section of Plage Blanche and found no evidence of nesting, and the fishermen I encountered said they had never seen nesting turtles – very disappointing! It had been nearly 40 years since Pasteurs and Bons reported nesting at Plage Blanche and a decline in nesting in a shorter period of time has been reported in other sea turtle populations. Nevertheless, I remain dissatisfied with the information I could collect about Plage Blanche…one of these days I hope to make a more organized trip to survey the entire stretch and to talk to the older fishermen in that region …
