Projeto Tamar : Turtle Conservation Project

Projeto Tamar is a  turtle conservation project based in the state of Bahia, Brazil. Established in 1980 the organisation has 19 bases covering approximately 1,100 miles of coastline.  Five species of turtle, all of which are endangered, nest on the Bahia coast and Tamar's mission is to ensure research, conservation and management of turtles ensure their best chance of recovering in numbers. Most turtles killed when coming ashore are females ready to nest, killed for their eggs.

Loggerhead Turtle

 Education in helping develop fishing methods that reduce by catch are a vital part of the work done with the local community. As turtles reach maturity at 25 and adulthood at 30 restoring the life cycle and recovering numbers takes considerable time. With the project itself at 33 only just reaching maturity as the first years hatchlings are reaching maturity and breeding age themselves the long term focus of the project becomes clear.

We visited one of the visitor centre at Praia do Forte, one of eleven along the coast. We were outside nesting season which runs from September to March so didn't get to see the work that goes on when the hatchlings make their way to the sea. The visit was still worthwhile and informative.

The project has several tanks for viewing the different species of turtle, being up close with them you can see how large yet venerable they are.

Green Sea Turtle

Feeding time at 2:30 every afternoon is, unsurprisingly a popular activity and a chance to see the turtles up close, commentary is in Portuguese.

Turtle feeding

These hatchlings are one month old and considerably less than the size of your hand. Only one in a thousand of these will reach adulthood.

The project also contains one of only three nurse shark breeding projects in the world, helping long term survival of another slow maturing and threatened species.

Information is scattered around, some in Portuguese but most is translated to English as well, which is helpful for us.  Some of the non translated information is infographic or charts so you can still get a feel for what the numbers say and how populations are increasing, encouragingly.

The project website link is here here for those that would like more detail on the work Projeto Tamar does an the success they are having.

They are even succeeding in predicting world cup results with Halter a 27 year old Loggerhead being selected as the official pitaqueiro for the competition. This fun activity is another way of raising awareness of the need for conservation of these animals. In this case he corctly predicted Brazil would beat Chile, though I doubt he would have predicted it to be as close as it was!

Set up for Halter the Loggerhead to predict the result if Brazil V Chile