The Top of the iceberg for Green Sea Turtles

Green Sea Turtles in the Queensland Reefs are diminishing and considered endangered; this is due to many factors such as climate change, pollution, industrial fishing, local fishing and poaching of the Green Sea Turtles, to name a few.

Climate change affects the nesting incubation, heating the sand dunes, and therefore the exceeding number of females hatchlings to male. Less and less turtles are nesting on our Gold Coast beaches due to sand erosion and light pollution. Pollution in the ocean has many turtles mistaking plastics for their food source. Our turtles need help and supporting the conservations that research and help them keep the species alive is imperative.

There is an estimation of 5.25 trillion pieces of plastic with roughly 4 billion microfibres per square kilometres and around 300,000 tons of plastic floating in our oceans (Davis Marine Brokerage, Ocean Pollution Facts, 2024).

100million Micro plastics being washed into our waterways from a full synthetic wash of our clothes (Microfibers Released To Water, F. De Falco, Feb 26, 2020), or the soft plastics that enter the ocean having turtles mistake the plastic for jelly fish or algae. Landfill rubbish that is not cared for properly also ends up in our waterways.

Climate change affects our Green Sea Turtles nesting on Queensland beaches by providing to warm of incubation temperatures which form more female turtles. The Great Barrier Reefs colony’s of Green Sea Turtles have females out numbering males by at least 116 to 1. Continuing this trend of feminisation the species can rapidly cease to exist, (WWF-Aus, 2018). Also contributing to our rising ocean waters is the pollution in the ocean melting the ice caps and leaving less safe areas for the turtles to nest and the hatchlings to make it to the ocean.

Davis Marine Brokerage, Ocean Pollution Facts, 2024, https://www.davismarine.com.au/ocean-pollution-facts- 2021/#:~:text=The%20ocean%20contains%20about%205.25,tests%20occurred%20in%20the%20sea.

De Falco, F., Et. Al. (26/02/2020). Microfibers Released to water, https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acs. est.9b06892

WWF Australia, (2018), Green Turtle, https://wwf.org.au/what-we-do/species/green-turtle/

WWF-Aus, Freund. J. (2018), Green Sea Turtle, https://wwf.org.au/what-we-do/species/green-turtle/