Polson High School students travel to Costa Rica to help save these leviathans from poachers

The Daily Inter Lake

Leatherback sea turtles have been around for more than 65 million years, long enough to witness the fall of dinosaurs and the rise of humanity.

But it's also just long enough for the impressive oceanic reptiles to fall prey to that humanity.

Poachers rob the behemoths' beach-side nests in Costa Rica, reported 16-year-old Michael Young, a sophomore at Polson High School.

Young and several classmates just returned from a trip to the Central American country, where they did their parts to thwart poachers who trade the risk of jail time for a chance to sell the eggs at something like 60 cents apiece as a supposed fertility aid, Young said.

Costa Rican banana growers send toxic pesticides into ocean waters, he added, the only home the turtles know. Plastic bags, which he said cover the banana bunches as they grow, also end up in the water. There, he said, hungry turtles mistake them for floating jellyfish, reportedly their sole food source, and end up with intestines full of plastic.

Last month, the world's largest living sea turtle got a hand from Young and 11 fellow students led by Polson's environmental science teacher Jim Rogers as they traveled to Costa Rica to work alongside wildlife biologists in the race to protect the leatherback.

"We definitely got a feel for what we can do to help with the environment," Young said of their 10-day trip to Pacuare Nature Reserve. A field station with four miles of Caribbean beach and a 2,000-acre forest, Pacuare serves as one base of operation for Ecology Project International, a nonprofit organization co-founded by former University of Montana graduate student Scott Pankratz.

"Sea turtles are amazing. Their shells are a meter-and-a-half long [about 6 feet] - as long as a person is tall. They're huge," Young said. Statistics show they grow as long as 8 feet and weigh from 1,200 to 1,500 pounds.

"We got to see what not even a fraction of the world population ever gets to see," he said.

It's that fascination with the natural world that Rogers hoped to instill in his science students April 16-25 as he led his fourth trip to Pacuare.

"It's a great opportunity for students to participate in what I call the adventure of science," Rogers said.

"They are working firsthand with, in this case, wildlife biologists. And they are engaged in a scientific problem, an endeavor," he said. "The whole process of science is what they are exposed to - the data gathering, the methods biologists use, and the hard work."

Indeed, it's not a trip for the lazy.

Students spend the morning in classes learning about turtle biology, working with the biologists on their research, helping design data-collection methods.

Afternoons often find them taking two- or three-hour hikes through the rain forest as they study the ecology, which blends a vast array of plant life and the monkeys, toucans, poisonous eyelash vipers and other exotic creatures.

Then, from 8:30 p.m. to 4 a.m., students work in shifts to patrol the beach, watching for female turtles to crawl ashore and begin building nests in which to lay their clutches of 100 or so eggs.

Taking gentle advantage of the "trance" in which the female remains during the hour or so it takes her to lay the eggs, biologists and students measure and tag the turtles, count and often collect their eggs in plastic bags, then relocate the eggs into the forest where they hope they are hidden from poachers. Breeding only once every two years - the turtles swim 60,000 miles before females lumber onto a beach for egg-laying, Polson junior Kelsie Delaney said - females will dig perhaps 10 nests for their eggs on various stretches of beach before going back to the ocean.

Finished with their nocturnal excursion, students get a little shut-eye. Breakfast is at 9 a.m., signaling the start of another research day.

"All the biologists," Rogers said of the research crew at Pacuare, "even though they have done this for a long time, every one of them still has the enthusiasm. They're discovering a new aspect or nuance, or they see another turtle.

"The students get to experience that first-hand," Rogers said. "As a science teacher, I want to expose students to science."

Josh Tankersley, a 17-year-old Polson High junior, said it might even change his choice of a career.

He's not in the environmental science class, but he heard about the Costa Rica trip when Rogers was his astronomy teacher. It looked interesting, so he signed up.

"When we got to the reserve it was all different," Tankersley said. "The turtles were not what I expected. It was cool - the turtles were a lot bigger; I'd never seen one before."

For Tankersley, seeing was believing.

"I was never interested in marine biology before. But now that I've seen aspects of it, one part of it is more interesting," he said.

He hopes to return to Pacuare as a research assistant during the next nesting season. And he said he just might major in marine biology in college.

"That is not without precedent," Rogers said. Two or three years ago another student, Lily Coble, took part in two Costa Rica trips with Rogers. "She did such a good job down there that the biologist knew who she was."

Coble graduated early from high school and was hired to work at Pacuare that breeding season from March through July. It was the first time the project had hired anyone in or fresh out of high school, before the student started college, he said.

"I think some students have actually changed their career because of this; others had an idea and got confirmation from the trip," Rogers said. "They said, 'This is exciting, this is something I could be interested in.'"

"It's the sort of thing that I would like to do later in life," Delaney said. "It was a great experience to go out and see what it's really like out there, and get the chance to work with these magnificent animals.

"They are huge and they have absolutely incredible abilities. To be out there and helping them in a higher process, you became connected to them."

Although marine biology took the limelight for some, the cross-cultural connection rang true for others.

"I think the biggest thing was the culture shock," Polson High senior Isaac Swan said. "There are major differences between Polson, Montana, and Costa Rica. There's a great deal of poverty, just the Third-World-nation shock of it. It's the kind of thing you see in the movies, but this is it. It's real."

A ramshackle hospital that upon first sight looked like a slum-side housing project left an impression on Swan. Still, he said he loved the people and the multilingual experience.

"The introduction to a new culture, the geographical setting," Rogers summed it up. "They are in the rain forest. For most of them, they certainly haven't encountered that variety of people, different music, food, ways of doing things."

It was a bit humbling, he said, and initially a shock for them.

"It's a learning experience for them on many different levels."

Reporter Nancy Kimball can be reached at 758-4483 or by e-mail at nkimball@dailyinterlake.com