SEA TURTLES | The Extinction We're Writing Right Now

Sea turtles have survived every mass extinction, every ice age, and 200 million years of a changing ocean. They outlasted the dinosaurs. They are older than the Atlantic itself. And in the last 50 years we have done more damage to their populations than any natural event in the last 50 million. This video covers everything, the magnetic navigation system so precise a turtle returns to within meters of her birth beach after decades at sea, the lost years mystery that puzzled biologists for generations, and the leatherback, a reptile that dives deeper than most submarines and maintains a body temperature its biology should not allow. Then the threats. Bycatch killing 250,000 turtles every year in fishing gear nobody films. Plastic that looks identical to jellyfish from below. Warming sand producing populations approaching 99% female. Beach development, light pollution, and egg poaching that has already driven at least one population from thousands of nesting females to fewer than ten. Six of seven species are endangered or critically endangered. Some populations are recovering and the tools to change the trajectory exist. But the window is real and it is not unlimited.