The Mexican family who gave up fishing to monitor and rescue sea turtles
by Astrid Arellano – MongaBay – Creative Commons
- The Kino Bay Turtle Group is made up of a family of former fishers from the state of Sonora in northwestern Mexico.
- The group keeps a close watch on sea turtles in the La Cruz Lagoon, a Ramsar site spanning 6,665 hectares (about 16,470 acres), monitoring the animals, rescuing any that become entangled and educating the public about their importance.
- The group has captured and logged data on more than 800 sea turtles; it is now training a team of Indigenous Comcáac youth to form their own turtle group and begin monitoring and conservation work along a 10-kilometer (6-mile) stretch of coast in Sonora.
(MongaBay) – BAHÍA DE KINO, Mexico — For several years, Cosme Becerra was tasked with sacrificing a sea turtle to be eaten at a festival. In the mid-1990s, the fisherman received a large live turtle several days before one of these events. He kept the turtle in his family’s bathroom, waiting for the day of the festival. “But it wouldn’t stop making a noise … ‘hoooo’… ‘hoooo,’” said Becerra, imitating the animal’s wheeze that he heard night after night.
“That sigh — that noise — wouldn’t let me sleep,” said Becerra. “On one side, I was hearing it, and on the other side, Moni, my wife, would not let me sleep, saying to me: ‘Poor little thing, she looks like a woman; look at how she’s crying. Did you see her tears? They’re all over the floor. … Let her go, please.’” Although he did not want to, because the turtle “belonged” to somebody else, Mónica’s insistence made Becerra return the turtle to the sea the following day.
“We released her, and since then, we have not gone back to consuming turtles or killing them,” Becerra said of that moment, which is seared in his memory. Before a Mexican law prohibited the practice in 1990, fishers saw turtles they occasionally caught by accident as a source of extra income that could help in the event of an economic emergency, like when one of the children in the Becerra family was hospitalized. For that reason, years later, in 2010, Cosme Becerra wanted to return the favor: He decided to formally dedicate his time to the conservation of turtles in Kino Bay (or Bahía de Kino), a small fishing community with just over 6,400 residents located in the state of Sonora in northwestern Mexico.
Cosme Becerra left the fishing industry, and since 2007 he has worked as a boat captain for marine mammal-monitoring efforts run by the Prescott Center, an Arizona-based educational institution with facilities in Kino Bay that focuses on social and environmental studies. Through this work, Becerra convinced his family that the future was in wildlife conservation.
Now, the Becerra family — made up of about 15 relatives, including spouses, parents, siblings, cousins, children and grandchildren — practices sustainable fishing. They combine this with other professions and dedicate part of their time to conservation work. In order to fund this conservation work, they turn to programs offered