Voyage Of The Turtle In Pursuit Of The Earths Last Dinosaur Carl Safina by Carl Safina 9780805083187, 0805083189, B003J4VEFO instant download after payment.

"Magnificent . . . A joyful, hopeful book. Safina gives us ample reasons to be enthralled by this astonishing ancient animal--and ample reasons to care."

--Los Angeles Times

As Carl Safina's compelling natural history adventure makes clear, the fate of the leatherback turtle is in our hands. The distressing decline of these ancient sea turtles in Pacific waters and their surprising recovery in the Atlantic illuminate the results--both positive and negative--of our interventions and the lessons that can be applied, globally, to restore the oceans and their creatures.

We accompany award-winning natural history expert Safina and his colleagues as they track leatherbacks across the world's oceans and onto remote beaches of every continent, including a thrilling journey from Monterey, California, to nesting grounds in Papua, New Guinea. Throughout, in his peerless prose, Safina captures the delicate interaction between these gentle giants and the humans who are playing a significant role in their survival.

Starred Review. MacArthur fellow and John Burroughs Award–winner Safina (Song for the Blue Ocean) presents an impassioned account of the plight of ocean-dwelling turtles, especially the largest, the leatherback, "the closest thing we have to a living dinosaur." Leatherbacks, which can weigh over a ton, range the oceans to nesting sites on beaches along the Atlantic and Pacific seaboards. Safina travels to many of these sites, bringing the reader into the turtles' world as he describes how the females leave the ocean, cross sandy beaches, dig huge pits using their flippers as spades, lay their eggs and then creep back into the sea. He shows how precarious this world is; nature's dangers are always present, but it's human activities that threaten the turtles with extinction: poaching, longline fishing nets in which the turtles can drown and depletion of the turtles' food supply due to overfishing and global warming. There are remedies, such as intensive nest-saving programs, but these take time to implement, and time is running out for the turtles. Safina's eloquent book is a battle cry in the struggle for the survival of one of the world's most beautiful and endangered creatures. Maps. (June 27)
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Adult/High School–This book is Safina's personal journal of the migration of the leatherback, loggerhead, and green turtles. These aquatic creatures of reptilian descent wander throughout the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Eventually they die in captivity because they don't understand boundaries. This limitless ocean life is in jeopardy due to long-line fishing, poaching, and commercial development along the beaches of Trinidad and Mexico, where they nest. The author is passionate about conservation efforts, describing the eco-tourist work of Nature Seekers and the legal efforts of Oceana in protecting the now critically endangered leatherback turtles. More than a chronicle of attempts to save the species, Turtle captures the physical magnitude of these ancient creatures and the repetitive calm of their endless travels. Safina's simple and deeply personal style captures both the mystery of the leatherbacks' life cycle and the need to develop a global understanding of their plight to survive. This title will quickly become a part of the classroom libraries of those teaching life science and ecology.–Brigeen Radoicich, Fresno County Office of Education, CA
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.