The story behind Turtle: The Incredible Journey, a film tracking the journey of a loggerhead turtle as she travels across the Atlantic Ocean and narrated by twice Oscar-nominated actress Miranda Richardson.
Cheryl-Samantha Owen, Save Our Seas Foundation
The Telegraph 27 Feb 09;
With the growing interest in cinema documentaries, entering the big screen domain of Hollywood gives us a chance to reach new audiences and raise much needed awareness about the threats to our oceans. We hope to inspire the children of today to be custodians of our marine world tomorrow, while at the same time stirring their parents to save our seas now.
SOSF believes that watching Turtle: The Incredible Journey at the cinema will allow for a more dramatic and emotional experience than a TV production, keeping the ocean and issues such as over-fishing, destructive and wasteful fishing methods, pollution and the negative impacts of beach development at the forefront of people's minds. Though the popcorn may have long vanished we hope the impact on people from the film will help stop the ocean's inhabitants from going the same way.
The star of the film is a loggerhead named FeeBee that was released off the Florida coast in 2008 as part of a project led by one of the world's leading turtle biologists and the film's key science consultant, Professor Jeanette Wyneken from the Florida Atlantic University.
Filming took the crew to Florida, the Arctic Circle, Sargasso Sea, Azores and Caribbean to recreate the epic distances and dangers faced by a female loggerhead turtle from the time it hatches until it returns to lay eggs on the beach of its birth 20 or so years later.
The film is part of a greater conservation campaign to increase awareness and support for marine turtles, and the Foundation supports turtle projects in Florida, The Seychelles, Malaysia, and Kenya, and a scientific workshop in Hawaii.
Like reptiles from a bygone era the seven species of sea turtles swim through Earth's oceans today just as they did one hundred million years ago. Despite having survived the mass extinction of the dinosaurs, they are not indestructible. Today they face an arguably more perilous existence at the hand of man and their numbers have drastically reduced dangerously close to the point of collapse.
At every stage of their life cycle, sea turtles are impacted by human activities. These challenges start from a loss of nesting beach and foraging habitats and continue with mortalities on the high seas through intense pelagic fishing practices. If the turtles manage to survive these hooks of death, they then have to negotiate their way through an ocean full of non-biodegradable waste and pollutants.
Sea turtles have a priority for conservation through their listing in the Convention on the Conservation on Migratory species (CMS), the Convention on international Trade in Endangered species of wild fauna and flora (CITES-appendix 1) and the World Conservation Union (IUCN) as either endangered or critically endangered (IUCN- EARO and IUCN/SSC, 1996).
To learn more about sea turtles and to watch the film's trailer please visit: http://www.saveourseas.com/turtlefilm
