Help Protect Endangered Sea Turtles in Curacao

Sea Turtle Conservation Curacao & Green Phenix win Grassroots Conservation Award

Last week Sabine Berendse and Ard Vreugdenhil represented Sea Turtle Conservation Curacao during the 39^th International Sea Turtle Symposium in Charleston. They participated in 6 workshops, presented in 3, showed the music video “Can you see” which was made at the beginning of 2018 and was a collaborative project with a dozen local artists. Sabine Berendse also presented in the “Future of Conservation” session.

The presentation in the “Future of Conservation” session about ‘effective conservation through collaboration with precious plastic initiatives’ was candidate for the Grassroots Conservation Award (GCA). The criteria is that the presentation demonstrates a positive contribution by a grassroots group or individual towards conservation of marine turtles and their habitats.

In her presentation Sabine showed that a collaborative approach with the Precious Plastic community, which counts 40K members worldwide, can make huge global impact on reducing plastic pollution by taking local action in repurposing post- consumer plastic. Reducing waste stream output by stimulating circular economy systems can prevent plastic from ending up in the ocean. She showed several product possibilities and for her presentation she wore a meaningful dress from label dresscode010, which is made out of 17 recycled PET bottles.

The founding of Green Phenix as a social enterprise was explained and partners like LIMPI, Green Force, 2ndlife Curacao, Dresscode010 and BA3d printing were recognized.

During the award ceremony the grassroots conservation award was the last award that was announced, following the lifetime awards in which several conservation heroes were recognized, like Jeffrey Miller, Rod Mast and Wallace J Nichols. Obviously the results of STCC would not have been possible without the amazing support of the fantastic volunteers and partners, so the award was dedicated to them. Receiving the Grassroots Conservation Award is a huge honor!

It has been a few busy months...

With the nesting season in it's peak, we have done quite some nest excavations. We found one nest with a lot of deformed hatchlings, which was sad but also very interesting. On Klein Curacao we have been able to help quite a few desoriented hatchlings. Only 2 more months left in the season. We are working on an overview and in the next report we will be able to give an overview of how many turtles were born on our islands

Futhermore we had to perform quite a few number of turtle rescues, because of hooking and entanglement incidents. Fortunately we have a very motivated and proffesional team, who have been able to save 100% of the turtles that were reported as hooked.

A huge thanks goes out to all the people supporting our work. We could not do it without you!