Hawaii FEP - Western Pacific Fishery Council

turtles outnumber adults 100:1. These populations are also sex biased, with femalesoutnumbering males 2.57:1 (Limpus 1992).Along the far western and southeastern Pacific, hawksbill turtles nest on the islands andmainland of southeast Asia, from China to Japan, and throughout the Philippines, Malaysia,Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands (McKeown 1977), and Australia (Limpus1982).The hawksbill turtle is listed as endangered throughout its range. In the Pacific this species isthreatened by harvesting of the species for its meat, eggs, and shell, as well as the destruction ofnesting habitat by human occupation and disruption. Along the eastern Pacific Rim, hawksbillturtles were common to abundant in the 1930s (Cliffton et al. 1982). By the 1990s, the hawksbillturtle was rare to absent in most localities where it was once abundant (Cliffton et al. 1982).Hawksbill turtle populations are benefitting from conservation and recovery programs but havenot yet recovered. Hawksbill turtles occur in waters around the Hawaii Archipelago and nest onMaui and the southeast coast of the Big Island.Olive Ridley Sea TurtlesOlive ridley turtles (Lepidochelys olivacea) are olive or grayish green above, with a greenishwhite underpart, and adults are moderately sexually dimorphic (NMFS and USFWS 1998e).Olive ridleys lead a highly pelagic existence (Plotkin 1994). These sea turtles appear to foragethroughout the eastern tropical Pacific Ocean, often in large groups, or flotillas. In a 3-year studyof communities associated with floating objects in the eastern tropical Pacific, Arenas et al.(1992) found that 75 percent of sea turtles encountered were olive ridleys and were present in 15percent of the observations, thus implying that flotsam may provide the turtles with food, shelter,and/or orientation cues in an otherwise featureless landscape. It is possible that young turtlesmove offshore and occupy areas of surface-current convergences to find food and shelter amongaggregated floating objects until they are large enough to recruit to the nearshore benthic feedinggrounds of the adults, similar to the juvenile loggerheads mentioned previously.While it is true that olive ridleys generally have a tropical range, individuals do occasionallyventure north, some as far as the Gulf of Alaska (Hodge and Wing 2000). The postnestingmigration routes of olive ridleys, tracked via satellite from Costa Rica, traversed thousands ofkilometers of deep oceanic waters ranging from Mexico to Peru and more than 3,000 kilometersout into the central Pacific (Plotkin 1994). Stranding records from 1990–1999 indicate that oliveridleys are rarely found off the coast of California, averaging 1.3 strandings annually (J. Cordaro,NMFS, personal communication, NMFS 2004).The olive ridley turtle is omnivorous, and identified prey include a variety of benthic and pelagicprey items such as shrimp, jellyfish, crabs, snails, and fish, as well as algae and seagrass(Marquez 1990). It is also not unusual for olive ridley turtles in reasonably good health to befound entangled in scraps of net or other floating synthetic debris. Small crabs, barnacles, andother marine life often reside on debris and are likely to attract the turtles. Olive ridley turtlesalso forage at great depths, as a turtle was sighted foraging for crabs at a depth of 300 meters76