Should Endangered Turtles Have Legal Rights?

The members of The Leatherback Project are nursing warm Cokes and thin coffee at a military base on the edge of Panama City. Nearby, four Panamanian air force mechanics are silhouettes against a sunlit green backdrop of jungle as they huddle around a tiny camouflage-painted Cessna. It is unclear when the little plane last flew, but it is definitely not ready for takeoff. The team’s departure hour on that plane has been a moving target all morning, and now it’s creeping into afternoon. They might not get down to the Indigenous village of Armila, near the Panama-Colombia border, before dark. Nighttime is when female leatherback turtles crawl out of a Caribbean current that is often too strong for human swimmers and lay the eggs of the next generation of their dwindling species.

The founder of the Leatherback Project, Callie Veelenturf, doesn’t mind the delay. A marine biologist with wide-set hazel eyes and long reddish hair in a tight braid, she always looks vulnerable and much younger than her age of 31, and today she is a whiter shade of pale. “I just threw up,” she says, rather merrily, as she arrives. “I’m always airsick and boatsick, now. I feel like that all the time.”

Callie Veelenturf watches with delight as a hatchling heads to the sea. Her headlamp is switched to red light to avoid disturbing the turtles’ biorhythms. Neil Ever Osborne

A live leatherback sea turtle hatchling found during nest excavation. Hatchlings head to the water about 60 days after their mother lays the eggs. Neil Ever Osborne

Veelenturf established the Leatherback Project as a nongovernmental organization just before the Covid-19 pandemic. Since then, she has traded robust health for endangered turtles. As the rest of the world was catching the coronavirus, she came down with Zika or dengue, she doesn’t know which. Sick for weeks, she was left with fibromyalgia and other chronic ailments. None of this has halted her work. With a small team, she has been tagging turtles on the Pacific and Caribbean coasts of Panama, studying their habits in water and on land, analyzing nests, logging eggs and hatchlings, and training local Indigenous communities to do the nightly turtle data collection.

The leatherback family has been on earth since the Cretaceous period, 110 million years ago, but much is still unknown about these turtles and their habits. They eat nearly a ton of jellyfish a day, weigh half a ton to one and a half tons—making them the heaviest non-crocodilian reptiles—and live their whole lives in the open sea. Only females return to land, to lay eggs roughly once every three to five years.

Once common all over the world’s oceans, leatherbacks now exist in only seven populations worldwide. According to the Leatherback Project, four of those populations are now considered critically endangered, due to low population size or a decline of more than 80 percent in the last decade. One population is rated as endangered. There is insufficient data on the other two groups to assess their status.

The Leatherback Project is comparatively small in the universe of sea turtle and ocean conservation. The Leatherback Trust, for example, tracks the migration of 500 sea turtles and has assets of $2.4 million.

Veelenturf’s project also differs from other conservation efforts in its focus on policy goals. Veelenturf is an internationally known advocate for the Rights of Nature law, a radical legal construction, rooted in the so-called deep ecology movement of the 1970s, that gives nature personhood rights. Under the law, a self-appointed guardian—any citizen, in theory—may file a case on behalf of a logged rainforest, a polluted river—any living system or creature whose habitat is threatened by human activities.

According to Veelenturf, the Leatherback Project is also the only leatherback turtle nonprofit focused on risks to the species at sea, where they get tangled in plastic fishing nets and drown as bycatch. The project is working with fishermen and larger fisheries to reduce this bycatch.

The project is currently studying nesting areas on the Caribbean side of Panama, around Armila, and in the Pearl Islands archipelago, a strip of 200 islands and islets on the Pacific side. For about three to five months every year, the females crawl up on land and lay hundreds of eggs in periods of about nine days. They barely eat during the laying season. At the end of it, depleted, they paddle thousands of miles north or east to feed on the jellyfish that sustain them.

The endangered subpopulation of turtles near Armila happens to nest just 125 to 150 nautical miles east of the traffic jams of colossal freighters at the entrance to the Panama Canal. Human activity is the chief threat to the turtles. Humans eat them or their eggs. They cover their nesting beaches with trash, or develop them into resorts and ports. And people contribute to a changing climate. Higher temperatures around the nests can simply cook the eggs. The heat also hurts breeding prospects by creating a gender imbalance. When temperatures are below 82 degrees Fahrenheit, more males hatch, while temperatures above about 88 degrees lead to more females hatching—a fact turtle scientists shorthand to “hot chicks, cool dudes.”

Besides collecting data in the nesting areas, Veelenturf has attached satellite transponders to 17 sea turtles on the beaches of the Pacific and 11 near the neighboring towns of Armila, Panama, and Acandí, Colombia. They are the first leatherbacks in Colombia and along the east coast of Panama to be tagged with transponders. These turtles, representative of an estimated population in the thousands, appear in real time on her laptop screen as different colored lines, zigzagging up and down a map of the Colombian and Panamanian coasts.

The transponders are expensive, between $1,500 and $5,000 each—a significant amount of money for a small operation like hers. But Veelenturf says the mapping has “very tangible conservation management implications” for the tiny Gulf of Urabá. New ports are being planned there, one of which has already started construction. It is abundantly clear from Veelenturf’s data that ship traffic in and out of the small notch of the gulf will disrupt active leatherback turtle nesting waters. Through the transponders, she hopes to provide evidence that might influence decisions about the new shipping lanes.

Cover image of the Smithsonian Magazine January/February 2024 issue

Subscribe to Smithsonian magazine now for just $19.99

This article is a selection from the January/February 2024 issue of Smithsonian magazine

Callie Veelenturf conducts a "wiggle test" to confirm the attached satellite tag is sitting right as a leatherback sea turtle completes nesting. — Veelenturf conducts a "wiggle test" to confirm the attached satellite tag is sitting right as a leatherback sea turtle completes nesting. Neil Ever Osborne

On this May trip, probably the last one to the Panama-Colombia border coast during the winter-spring laying season, Veelenturf’s voluminous waterproof backpack holds four more transponders she hopes to attach to turtles nesting on the little gulf on the Colombian side. At the moment, she has no permit from the local government to visit the beach or tag the turtles there.

As thunderclouds bunch to the south, a pair of youthful Panamanian pilots appear. One is wearing braces, making him look even younger. Soon the old Cessna is bouncing through the cumulus, the dense rainforest below resembling a head of broccoli. The Panamanian isthmus is so narrow, and so sinuous, that from above it is hard to tell which body of water is the Pacific and which is the Caribbean.

An hour later the Cessna touches down on a strip of asphalt in the jungle village of Puerto Obaldía. The team’s arrival interrupts a little soccer game by the runway. Men in Day-Glo green shirts and shorts stop and watch. Children and mothers holding babies rise from hammocks to see the team disembark.

Roadless jungle extends beyond the village, and the only way in or out is from the ocean, by plane or boat. This area is known as the Darién Gap—the point where the Pan-American Highway ends and, for 60 miles, nature reigns supreme. As untamed as this land is, it is a path that human feet have trod for millennia. The ancestors of South American Indigenous people arrived via this route from the far north many thousands of years ago.

Now, hundreds of thousands of northbound migrants, often with children in tow, trek through the gap in the other direction, choosing to risk days of snakes and mud to reach jobs and safety. Hence the soldiers. The government discouraged the Leatherback Project team from traveling in the area without official accompaniment. The area is both a frequently traveled migrant route north and a drug-smuggling territory.

Veelenturf meets with Genoveva “Nelly” Forero (seated at table, bottom right), a naval captain who provides security to the project and also helps with its research. Neil Ever Osborne

At Puerto Obaldía, Panama’s border guards at the frontier with Colombia check IDs. Automatic weapons strapped on, they lead the team through the village and onto a wooden boat that sets a course into swells and toward the sunset.

Armila sits at the mouth of the Armila River and is buffeted by heavy Caribbean waves. Access by water (the only way to the town) is tricky. To complete the final 200 yards of the journey, travelers perform an acrobatic maritime exercise of transferring themselves and their luggage into a smaller wooden boat that can navigate the coastal surf.

As we arrive at dusk, through a haze of spindrift and light rain, the village looks like a set from “Gilligan’s Island”: a row of thatched roofs, coconut trees, beached boats, children playing in the shallows. The piercing sound of a bird—a parrot, perhaps—cuts through the roar of surf as Veelenturf and her team drag gear around hand-carved dugouts and small painted boats with high prows. A nonworking telephone booth stands sentinel on shore. Short-haired women in traditional mola—colorful blouses, which they wear along with orange beads on their calves and forearms—stand like warriors, watching their men pull the boat onto the sand. Children splash in brown waters under the late-day pink light.

Men and boys play pickup soccer in the Panamanian town of Armila. The village has a population of about 600 Indigenous Guna people. Neil Ever Osborne

The village of Armila is at the mouth of the Armila River, which pours out into the Caribbean Sea. There are no hotels, so visiting researchers are official guests of the town. Neil Ever Osborne

Aderano Martinez Torres, a chief in the Guna village. The watercraft in the village range from speedboats to dugout canoes made from hollowed logs. Neil Ever Osborne

The Guna people of Armila are one of Panama’s seven Indigenous tribes, and the larger region, Guna Yala, consists of hundreds of small islands. The Guna are deeply connected to water, fearless in open boats on towering swells. They believe the leatherback contains in its body all of earth’s history, because of its ancient lineage. A Guna marine biologist on the expedition, Ramiselia Ramirez, a technician at Panama’s Aquatic Resources Authority, says colonizers first taught the Indigenous Guna people to eat them.

“For us, the turtle used to be sacred,” she says. “It was like a spirit with whom we shared a sense of fraternity.”

One of the aims of the Leatherback Project is to help support local people. Veelenturf is training University of Panama biology students Lineylis “Liz” Rios and Wiguidili “Wigui” Crespo, as well as Armila high school students, to conduct their own field research during the nesting season. The community’s role may become more formal as it works with the project to explore the idea of an official reserve around its shores.

Veelenturf is unusual among scientists in her passion for policy. During the pandemic, she connected with Panama’s first lady, Yazmín Colón de Cortizo, and Juan Diego Vásquez Gutiérrez, then 25, who was the youngest member of Panama’s National Assembly. In February 2022, Panama passed a countrywide Rights of Nature law, only the third nation to do so, after Bolivia and Ecuador. In November 2023, environmental and Indigenous groups successfully used the law to shut down a copper mine located in a biodiverse area on the Caribbean Sea. Veelenturf also helped push for a specific Rights of Turtles law, which allows people to bring suits against industry and developers on behalf of turtles. The legislature passed the turtle protections in March 2023. Veelenturf has also advocated for Panama to enact Rights of Nature laws to formally protect sharks, and she is working with scientists in the Peruvian jungle to protect bees, and in Indonesia to protect gibbons.

Wiguidili “Wigui” Crespo takes a faceful of sand as a turtle nests. Crespo’s probe measures the sand’s temperature, nutrients and salt levels. Neil Ever Osborne

Veelenturf’s soft-spoken, almost passive disposition camouflages raw energy. During the month I tracked her, she was on the go, in demand, extremely hard to catch up with. Besides doing nocturnal fieldwork on both coasts of Panama, she was in Washington, D.C. for a weeklong National Geographic conference, speaking in New York City at the Explorers Club and at the United Nations, and appearing before the state legislature in Rhode Island (where she went to college) and on Panamanian television, discussing the turtle nesting season. She was also writing a book proposal. “I can’t get anything done unless I have too many things going on,” she says.

Light rain, moonless night. At a long picnic table in the open-air thatched hut where the team eats meals and taps the only Wi-Fi for miles around, Veelenturf discusses the night’s plan with her colleagues: Ramirez, the Panamanian technician; Marino Abrego, chief of the oceans and marine division of Panama’s Ministry of Environment; and Nikki Riddy, the head of multimedia for the Leatherback Project. Her pallor from earlier in the day has disappeared. The sea air or the simple proximity of her passion, the turtles, has revitalized her.

Veelenturf knew from childhood growing up in the village of Norfolk, Massachusetts, that she “wanted to save animals,” but she didn’t know exactly how or what kind. She was smart, an only child, a sax-playing band camp nerd, with an unusual neurological trait called synesthesia—she “sees” musical notes and letters of the alphabet in specific colors.

On a high school graduation trip to Hawaii she encountered her first marine turtle while snorkeling, and she had an epiphany. “It was like when you look at a dog’s eyes and see their soul? I looked into its eyes, and I could see how wise it was. And after that, I knew what I wanted to do.”

After a night patrol, Veelenturf walks with Marino Abrego, left, chief of the oceans and marine division of Panama’s Ministry of Environment. Neil Ever Osborne

After she’d earned a degree in marine biology from the University of Rhode Island, she began working with leatherback turtles on the shores of Equatorial Guinea, on a project for a master’s degree in biology. She is now a PhD student in turtle conservation at the University of Central Florida.

Veelenturf and the team clamber in shallow water onto an open boat to cross the river to the nesting beach. The two college biology students and a pair of local high school seniors, one in a LeBron James jersey, hop in, along with a yellow village dog who will trot alongside the motley crew all night. Finally, four camo-clad members of the Panama border patrol climb aboard, two carrying machine guns. Setting off in a boat with them felt like tooling up the Mekong Delta in a scene from a Vietnam War movie.

The armed guards add to that atmosphere, always present during Veelenturf’s nighttime beach patrols. Until a few months ago, she didn’t even walk through Armila back to her bunk without an armed guard. Veelenturf works closely with Genoveva Forero, a Panamanian captain in the National Aeronautical Service who started off providing security and has since joined the project and assists with research. “The first time I saw a leatherback turtle I cried, because their energy is unbelievable,” says Forero. “I could feel the energy on the animal. Listening to the sounds they make feels like being in Jurassic Park. It is really indescribable.”

Researchers on a nocturnal patrol, accompanied by an armed guard. Sea turtles crawl ashore at night to lay their eggs, so scientists seek them out in the dark. Neil Ever Osborne

On the edge of the roaring ocean, we disembark. Seven people don headlamps turned to red light mode—white light will disturb the turtles and drive them back into the water. We start to hike. The surf slams, invisible a few feet away in the profound blackness, the undertow sucking back, the stormy breeze dizzying.

And then, suddenly, there she is: illuminated in red light, a creature the size of a Smart car, with a flexible chevron-shaped carapace and a dinosaur-like head. Veelenturf moves closer, and the team settles down around her. This turtle, Veelenturf explains, has already excavated a hole some three feet deep in the sand with her powerful flippers, laid her eggs and is now hiding the nest by kicking sand over and around it. The animal appears not to notice us. Egg-laying turtles are said to be in a trance while concentrating on the task at hand. In the dark, she resembles a giant insect or alien, except for the huge head, strangely emotional, salty tears seeping from her eyes, a natural mechanism that helps flush out sand, according to Veelenturf.

The researchers take up positions on the ground in a circle around her. The two high school boys come around with a measuring tape. The kid in the LeBron James jersey gently brushes the sand off the turtle’s back and measures it with the tape. The two college students pull out a clipboard and jot down vitals—size, location, the nest’s distance from the surf and from the tree line beyond the sand. Someone pulls out a special metal detector to quickly scan the animal for any previously attached metal tag. Part of Veelenturf’s project involves not just attaching passive integrated transponders, but also affixing tiny metal numbered tags, like ID badges, to the turtles to keep count of populations and for future researchers. If they don’t find a tag, they attach one. After recording the vitals, the students insert a temperature gauge into the nest, which will remain there until the eggs hatch.

Crespo and Ezequiel Diaz, left, measure a leatherback sea turtle’s upper shell, or carapace. The author of this story, Nina Burleigh, stands in the back. Neil Ever Osborne

The little expedition moves onward. Not more than a few hundred yards on, the red lights pick out another behemoth. This one is still in the process of laying eggs. We can hear her rhythmic slow breathing over the sound of the waves. Ramirez and Veelenturf get on their stomachs in the sand behind the turtle and, with gaiters pulled up over their noses to deflect the tiny insects attracted to the nest, gently lift her tail and count the eggs. They record 67 orbs glowing in the light of their headlamps.

Veelenturf and the team move on down the beach. In 95 days, a team member will return to see how many eggs hatched, how many hatchlings crawled out, and how many died in embryo or without getting out of the nest. For those who make it to the sea, nature is not kind: It is estimated that just 1 in 1,000 to 1 in 10,000 sea turtles reach adulthood.

The animals’ fertility and life cycle are still somewhat of a mystery to scientists. Leatherbacks live for at least 50 years, but perhaps much longer. They may not start reproducing until they are 20. Their mating process has rarely been observed and never been described in scientific detail. Females lay eggs fertilized by different males and, Veelenturf says, they seem to be able to store and even decide which sperm to use.

Veelenturf and the crew deem this first night on the beach a success. By the time the sky begins to lighten, around 4 a.m., they have logged seven turtles. But as the sun rises, the appalling state of the beach becomes visible. Besides sargassum—a seaweed clogging shores all over the hemisphere this year, probably due to ocean warming and nitrogen runoff—there are drifts of trash.

We see that we have been walking through a field of shoes, disposable diapers, plastic bottles, and broken bits of boat and other machines. There are so many shoes in the sand that one visiting journalist told me she broke a sandal in the dark and easily found not one but many sandals that fit.

The Armila beach trash is a stark reminder that Panama’s well-intentioned Rights of Nature law can only do so much. Its effectiveness is limited by human activity nearby and farther away. The surrounding Darién region is Panama’s poorest, and sanitation services in the jungle are nonexistent. Trash streams onto the beach from villages upriver and washes up from marine dumping around the Caribbean. Even Armila, where villagers serve as unofficial turtle guardians, lacks any form of green trash disposal and burns its waste. Farther away, fossil fuels heat great cities and move billions of people by car and plane, spewing carbon, heating land and water.

In Colombia, the situation is even more dire. Turtles, of course, know no borders, and corporations—bent on jungle resource extraction, including of gold and oil—have benefited from a port-building spree on the other side of the Gulf of Urabá. Colombia boasts 60 ports—a record number for a country of its size. The country has approved the construction of three ports on the eastern side of the gulf.

According to Karla Barrientos Muñoz, a Colombian environmental activist, the turtles were not taken into account in the environmental impact studies. Colombia’s environmental licensing agency told Smithsonian that of the three new ports licensed in the area, only one is currently under construction, and all three are subject to environmental evaluation. Asked about the turtles specifically, a spokesperson emailed that the agency is aware of the project’s living, non-living and socioeconomic implications.

The ports are to be located near the towns of Necoclí and Turbo, on the Gulf of Urabá. The two towns are on the migrant route leading north toward the United States, which has changed the economy. Veelenturf has tagged turtles near Acandí, another town on the migrant route. On this trip, she had hoped to tag a few more turtles at Necoclí to collect data to add to potential environmental impact studies. But she and local activists are in the dark about what will happen next with the port plans.

A leatherback’s eyes adapted to moonlit waters rather than dark land. Research shows that a spot on top of their heads may help them sense changes in sunlight. Neil Ever Osborne

“It’s very frustrating for us, because no matter how many doors we knock, we can’t find answers to why they would build three ports in the same location,” says Muñoz, who has been helping Veelenturf. “It is also clear to us they want to do it because they think they represent development, which is a great political strategy to win votes.” She adds that along with the promise of jobs, ports often bring prostitution and drugs to small villages unprepared for the explosion of economic activity.

Environmentalists in Colombia have successfully challenged port builders elsewhere in the country, including a massive port that had been planned for a biologically diverse area known as Tribugá on the Pacific coast. Colombian marine biologist Diana Ruiz-Pino conducted studies that helped persuade the government to abandon those plans. But for her involvement in the opposition, Ruiz-Pino faced death threats and was forced to relocate to Europe. The danger to environmentalists in Colombia is real: As of 2022, the nation topped the list of countries that had the most murders of environmental activists.

Ruiz-Pino says companies will use the ports to extract resources in remote but roadless regions rich in minerals or timber. “They need a big infrastructure to build a road to take the petrol and the gold and all the rare earths out,” she says. In recent years, the Colombian government had been in the habit of granting the permissions, Ruiz-Pino says. She hopes the new government, elected in 2022, is more amenable to environmental concerns.

Light rain, distant thunder, no moon. Flashes of heat lightning illuminate the sky. The team is out for the third night in a row, walking the pitch-black beach. After four hours it has only spotted a small boa near the jungle edge, but not a single laying turtle. This is odd and unexpected at the height of the laying season. But then, around 2 a.m., a sharp-eyed team member spies the tracks of a baby turtle in the dark and traces it back to a nest.

In whipping wind, Veelenturf and a few others get down on their knees, carefully digging at the sand with cupped hands. About three feet down, they see wriggling: hatchlings laid a few months earlier in January or February, now trying to dig their way up and out of the sand. Veelenturf explains that this sometimes happens—exiting baby turtles bury their siblings as they claw their way upward. The team plucks them out and gently massages their backs, like nurses working on a newborn, until their limbs start flailing. Soon eight baby turtles are scrambling around on the sand. Someone excavates the remains of a drifted plastic tub out of nearby trash and uses it as a pen to contain them.

Researchers sort eggs from a nest excavation. Shelled albumin globs, or embryo-less eggs, are at far right; unhatched eggs are at far left. A live hatchling is at bottom right. Neil Ever Osborne

The team members, on their bellies, pluck out and count hatched and unhatched eggs. At least 60 hatchlings appear to have survived out of more than 90 eggs—a very healthy ratio. The team logs the data, reburies the broken shells and releases the living babies to the edge of the sea to scuttle off to their fates.

Afterward, Veelenturf sits on the sand with the young assistants for a recap of the night’s activities. Three months earlier, in February, as the nesting season was beginning, the Armila kids didn’t know anything about her research. Now, the teens are handling measurements and logging data.

Miles from town, now, it is almost 4 a.m., the hour when the sky begins to tint from black to purple. Team members are sagging, straggling. In a light rain, they settle on the sand for naps before the long walk back. As the sky slowly pales to deep gray and then pink, Veelenturf talks about how she evolved from scientist to crusader.

“I got involved in Rights of Nature as policy as a scientist through defending my own rights in a harassment case,” she says. She was thrilled to land her first job out of her master’s program with the Turtle Island Restoration Network, a nonprofit conservation foundation. But she ended up filing a complaint against her boss for sexual harassment. The case went to mediation, and her boss never lost his job. (Smithsonian reached out to Veelenturf’s former boss for comment and received a letter, signed by seven of the organization’s current and former board members, asserting that the man in question “has made earnest and appropriate amends for this singular, unintentional incident, which sits in stark contrast to his 40-year admirable record of good deeds, successfully fighting for environmental and social justice, including women’s rights.”)

Veelenturf says that the experience was traumatic, but that it also set her on a new path. “I remember the moment I decided I was going to do this,” she says. “I was really down, depressed after my legal case. I just felt kind of helpless. I kind of felt like my career was over. I mean, that’s dramatic looking back on it, but at the time it felt like, ‘OK, my first job, I had this major crash-and-burn.’ And then I suddenly found myself legally engaged. And I realized that I could fight for justice.”

Veelenturf’s transponder evidence could well be used to test Panama’s new laws. She refuses to accept that the laws might not be effective. “Certain ecosystems already have rights,” she says, ticking off examples. In Colorado, environmental groups have declared Rights of Nature to protect the Colorado River and the Boulder Creek watershed. In Ecuador, where Rights of Nature laws have been enshrined in the constitution since 2008, courts have validated them in lawsuits involving mining concerns.

Abrego, from Panama’s Ministry of Environment, who walked the beach with Veelenturf on this expedition, says Panama’s Rights of Turtles law is most likely to be used first to stem coastal development. “This law is very important when it comes to the state communicating to these companies that they need to be educated and sensitized,” he says. “So whatever they do, they do it knowing that these turtles are endangered and that the necessary precautions need to be taken to protect them.”

Luisa Araúz, a staff lawyer at the Panamanian National Assembly who worked on the laws, says there was very little pushback from the private sector, possibly because “they didn’t really understand it.” She expects NGOs working on the Pacific side, where the turtles are critically endangered, to bring the first cases. But because the law is so new, and so untested, there could be a steep learning curve for judges in how to apply it.

Panama has invited NGOs to a training session so that environmental lawyers can relay lessons already applied in Ecuador, which has more than 15 years of precedent. “The example of Ecuador is very relevant,” says Constanza Prieto Figelist, legal director for the Latin American branch of the environmental NGO Earth Law Center. “It has been 18 years, and they keep learning how to use the Rights of Nature. Every country will have to decide how to apply the concept, but the experience of Ecuador is important to transmit. It is difficult to apply because it is not something we learn in law school.”

Before she started the project at Armila, Veelenturf donned mola (required for access to the village meeting house) and addressed the town, explaining her team’s work and asking for their support and permission. “My aim is to set up local conservationists, to leave behind something for the local communities to carry on,” she said.

When she returned for her latest visit in May 2023, Veelenturf was hoping to attend the annual Turtle Festival, held at the height of the nesting season for the last several years. But the gathering had been canceled because of endemic malaria in the Guna Yala area. The people of Armila conducted a beach cleanup anyway, with the Leatherback Project members helping to collect and haul away bags of trash.

Despite the health ministry’s ban, the nearby Guna village of Anachucuna is now holding a small folk-dance exhibition, and Veelenturf is keen to attend. She and a few expedition members board a boat and slam over the water to Anachucuna, 45 minutes away over ten-foot swells. There, on the packed dirt on the village square, boys and men in straw hats and matching khaki or navy pants play flutes and dance around women and girls decked out in mola the colors of parrots. The announcer recognizes Veelenturf, who has stayed in Armila three times in the past year—and afterward gives her a tour of the town.

Gladis Arosemena Caicedo de Crespo adorns her legs with traditional beads. In Guna, the beads are called “wini” and in Spanish, “chaquira.” Neil Ever Osborne

On the return voyage, one of the little boat’s two motors stalls out repeatedly. Then, just at the point where the Caribbean crashes into the mouth of the Armila River, a propeller falls off. A hard rain starts to fall as the boat bobs helplessly.

Passengers and boatman and navigator argue about what to do.

Although fluent in Spanish, Veelenturf doesn’t understand Guna. But she is unfazed, gazing off at the dense green wall along the coast. “That rainforest needs to be protected at all costs,” she says. I ask her if she isn’t curious about the motor emergency underway. “I’ll let them figure it out before I ask what they’re talking about,” she says.

Kara Dodge, an academic mentor of Veelenturf’s based at the New England Aquarium in Boston, who has traveled with her to Armila, says Veelenturf’s humility is key to her work. “She has a quiet but powerful leadership style, which seems to be built on mutual respect and genuine care for not only the animals but for the communities she is working in,” Dodge says. “On a personal level, she is a very kind, genuine person.”

Eventually, the boatman agrees with his navigator, a skinny, barefoot teen at the prow, who—it is clear even to non-Guna speakers—has been strenuously urging him to gun the one working motor straight over the rollers and take our chances. Gun it he does, and Veelenturf’s trust is rewarded as the boat crashes over the surf without capsizing. Soon a dozen passengers clamber off in what is now a ferocious downpour.

Callie Veelenturf presents data from her tagging project. Her group is the first to put transponders on sea turtles that travel between Colombia and Panama. Neil Ever Osborne

An hour later, dried off, Veelenturf hunches over her laptop in the main hut. Electricity has returned after a solar power blink-out from the heavy rain. Coffee is in the thermoses. A few hours of daylight are left, and then the team will head back out to search for turtles—its fourth night in a row. Veelenturf now knows that she isn’t going to get a permit from Colombia to tag turtles there on this trip. She will use the transponders meant for the turtles across the border to tag a few more turtles on the Armila nesting beach.

It’s not ideal, but at this moment, she is ecstatic. Looking at her laptop, she has just noticed that four turtles who vanished days after she tagged them with transponders earlier in the nesting season are back online after two months. Besides the lost data, replacing four expensive devices would have been hard for her little NGO to do.

“Look! I thought they were lost forever,” she says, studying the turtles’ tracks over the last couple of months. She traces the colored lines on the map, each corresponding to a turtle meandering along the edges of the Gulf of Urabá, and even farther south. “They are traveling the coast of Colombia. See? We might have expected them to go out to the deep ocean, but they really stayed here in the Urabá.”

In an interview later on, Muñoz, the Colombian environmental activist, will admit that she’s worried about the future. “If I’m very honest I don’t think we will succeed in stopping the construction of the ports,” she says. But Veelenturf’s enthusiasm is infectious. It’s hard not to share the young scientist’s joy at finding turtles who’d been given up as lost, learning new things about their habits, devoting another day to their preservation. “I do think we can at least tell people about the turtles and show them why the areas are important for them, and for us culturally,” Muñoz says. And she writes back to Veelenturf with a simple note of affirmation: “The turtles have spoken!”

With additional research by Maria Clara Cobo.