By Shivani Kuckreja

Over the course of the last few decades, sea turtle populations have been decreasing rapidly. Between 1990 and 2010, the number of loggerhead turtle nests on Florida’s beaches decreased by 50%. Furthermore, in Indonesia’s Bird’s Head Peninsula, the number of leatherback turtle nests decreased by 78% between 1984 and 2011. Today, it is thought that one out of every one thousand sea turtles progresses to adulthood. Around the world, these creatures are seen less and less often, due to human interference, climate change, and commercial overfishing. But James R. Spotila is aiming to reverse this trend.

A graduate of the University of Dayton, Ohio, Spotila currently holds the L. Drew Betz Chair Professor of Environmental Science Drexel University and leads Drexel’s Center for Biodiversity and Conservation. With over one hundred articles published in leading biology, ecology, and physiology journals, Spotila’s knowledge of sea turtles around the world is broad and deep. In 2004, he authored award-winning book Sea Turtles: A Complete Guide to Their Biology, Behavior, and Conservation. Seven years later, Spotila published a second book, titled Saving Sea Turtles: Extraordinary Stories from the Battle against Extinction.

With Spotila’s background grounded in the extensive knowledge of sea turtles and with his choice of book title, I expected Spotila’s Saving Sea Turtles: Extraordinary Stories from the Battle against Extinction to provide an engaging focus on a few detailed narratives of certain species of sea turtles.

In contrast to my expectations, Spotila provides a breadth of stories that offer glimpses into the lives of sea turtles without developing narratives fully enough to spark my empathy. While the topics of the narratives flow from one to the next, the narratives themselves seem to cut off to give way to a peek into a related topic far too soon. Within two pages, a narrative on turtle eggs and Viagra cuts off to lead way to an introduction to sea turtle nesting habits. Similarly, passages about the juvenile years of a sea turtle in the middle of the ocean are quickly followed by a new section of the book detailing the species’ eating habits. Especially with a book so broadly about sea turtles, (rather than focusing on one or two types of sea turtles), I felt as if I was still processing the very general information laid out in one narrative as I was being urged to move onto the next. While narratives can be powerful tools used to foster empathy and engage audiences, Spotila’s focus on a breadth of narratives rather than the depth of them leads to more overcharged passages than it does to clarity, and detracts from the self-reflection that should take place among readers when interacting with someone else’s stories.

In fact, what Spotila describes as a book that “contains facts and stories that will provide information and hope so that people today will…keep the dream alive of oceans full of sea turtles…” (x) seems to align more with a metanalysis of journal articles than it does with other books. Each narrative contains heavily condensed details of long-term studies conducted around the world throughout many different time periods. Over the course of the book, Spotila refers to studies on O2 and CO2 conducted in Florida and Costa Rica in the 1990s and 2000s, books on sea turtle juveniles written in the 1960s, and research on shrimp trawling in the 1970s, to name a few cited studies. Tackling such a wide range of topics during varying time periods, Spotila continues to struggle to weave engaging narratives throughout the book. Though I found the studies cited new and interesting, particularly those relating to the migration patterns of sea turtles, these studies overshadow the larger implications and complexities of the causes of and solutions to the sea turtle decline.

Overall, I felt Spotila could have better focused his time on suggesting solutions to ameliorate the decline of sea turtles worldwide. The last two pages of the book captured my attention the most and left me asking for more information, but the journey to those concluding pages felt as long as the average leatherback sea turtle migration.

Within the last two pages, Spotila hastily synthesized the complex relationships between the groups of people that rely on sea turtles to make a living, and gave readers some suggestions as to how we can play our part “in this unfinished play” (205). As a reader, this is the part I cared most about. Unfortunately, the conclusion of the book left me with more questions than answers, and while one may find this a positive reaction- a drive to learn more- I found it frustrating.

How can we address the growth of the human population without further declining the sea turtle population? In which ways can we change social norms to better protect sea turtles? Which economic tools (i.e. tax, subsidies) could the government use to help ensure that there is less illegal activity surrounding turtle egg poaching? How can we address the fact that “the developers have the will to develop, the commercial fisheries have the will to take all they can, and the poachers have the will to harvest all the eggs they can carry”? (204).

While I was hoping to finish Spotila’s book feeling motivated and driven to save sea turtles, I am left trying to deduce the endings of unfinished stories in order to better understand how I can help sea turtles survive and thrive in the future.