The science, drama and beauty of the vanishing sea turtle

"Voyage of the Turtle"

by Carl Safina

Henry Holt, 383 pp., $27.50

The largest animal we humans can approach without fear of attack is the sea turtle. It is so ancient that its kind has outlived the breakup of Pangea into the continents and the meteor that dispatched the dinosaurs. It dives deeper than the sperm whale, swims straight across the Atlantic or Pacific and sometimes slows its heart to a single beat a minute.

"Voyage of the Turtle," Carl Safina's ode to Earth's last monster reptile, the skin-covered leatherback turtle, begins on a beach in Trinidad, as an 800-pound female lumbers ashore to lay her eggs, "moving with the relentlessness of a lava flow." It's a perfect choice.

"Her head and neck are massive, the size of a soccer ball. ... Lying like a just-crashed saucer from the other side of darkness, with those huge splayed winglike flippers, she seems impossible."

For more than 100 million years, for 99 percent of their existence, the sea turtles encountered no humans. They met no hunters on the ocean surface and no machetes on the beach. No primates collected their eggs or roasted their flesh, no condominium walls blocked their path toward a nest above the surf. Hardly a raccoon or vulture — swarming these days to human trash — pilfered their eggs or swallowed their cookie-size hatchlings as they skittered toward the sea.

And nobody hung curtains in the ocean, each long-line net 50 miles of hooks — 70 million hooks set by Costa Rican fishers alone.

In an eyelash of time, 95 percent of the Pacific sea turtle population has vanished, crashing from Mexico to Malaysia in a mere two decades. The Atlantic-faring animals are imperiled but show signs of hanging on, with some populations recovering.

In "Voyage of the Turtle," marine conservationist Safina sets out to understand the discrepancy between the Pacific and Atlantic ecosystems. He spent his "genius" grant from the MacArthur Foundation seeking the turtle at sea, interviewing scientists, crusaders, fishers and poachers and scouring the world's beaches for answers.

Safina, 52, makes a wonderful guide. His knowledge brings a welcome complexity to his task. As he did in his 1998 book, "Song for the Blue Ocean," Safina spends time aboard fishing vessels, thrilling to a harpoon hunt for swordfish, even as he scans for leatherbacks coming up to breathe.

He is no enemy of fishers, no snob who thinks the claims of poor people can be sublimated in a bid to save the turtle. Like a widening array of environmentalists, Safina believes in cash payments, in this case hiring locals to safeguard nests and spending money to go head-to-head with developers and loggers — all of it deployed to purchase "a little more time to train fishermen, dissuade poachers, buy nesting beaches."

New fishing technologies, such as nets that extrude turtles and the circle hook, help stem the carnage. Safina quotes a Duke University researcher, "If you shut down the entire U.S. Fishery, you don't solve the problem for loggerheads and leatherback turtles. You can export new methods to other countries. You cannot export a closure."

Some of Safina's writing is achingly beautiful, a bit of it is preachy and purple. Occasionally "Voyage of the Turtle" can seem like a net dragged along the sea floor, bringing up all too many extraneous bits. And just how many folk want to read 383 pages on a single reptile?

The book would be stronger 75 pages lighter, but it has the merits of specificity. The 25 color photos enhance the trip, and the final pages are as glorious as the first ones.

Karen R. Long is the book editor

for The Plain Dealer of Cleveland. She can be contacted at klong@plaind.com.