Vancouver Magazine

Environment

Perpetual Motion

By Bruce Grierson published Nov 1, 2008

If you’re an endangered animal, you’d better hope that human beings find you cute like a Vancouver Island marmot, or charismatic like a grizzly, or majestic like a whooping crane. Then supermodels and rock stars and Disney animators will make emotional appeals on your behalf and the general public will feel genuinely sorry for you and you’re in the clear.

The leatherback sea turtle, whose catastrophic decline in the last two decades has landed it in the “critically endangered” category, isn’t what you’d call cute or charismatic. (Although it is kind of staggering in its primitive grandeur. Adult leatherbacks can grow to the size of a Volkswagen Beetle. They are, pretty much, living dinosaurs.) Its virtues are subtler. The campaign to save the leatherback is liable to attract not movie stars but poets, or perhaps philosophers.
The leatherback is an enigma wrapped in a puzzle. At least it was until 10 years ago, when Todd Jones, then at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton—who would move to Vancouver and become the first scientist to successfully raise leatherbacks in captivity, at a lab at UBC—took up their cause. Before then, all we knew about leatherbacks was that they hatched in the dead of night on a tropical beach, scurried down the sand, and, if they made it to the ocean alive, started swimming. And then they were gone. Where they went between that instant of departure and the time they waddled ashore as adults perhaps 20 years later, nobody knew. (The legendary turtle researcher Archie Carr called this stretch “the lost years.”) The leatherbacks were believed to command entire oceans and move into neighbouring ones, their whole lives consisting, Michael Phelps–like, of swimming and eating. (Unlike Phelps, who must occasionally stop to cash endorsement cheques, leatherbacks never stop swimming.