Of equal importance, delayed sexual maturity and the corresponding large number of immature age classes mask the effects of intense harvests, so that over-exploitation can be mistaken for sustainable utilization for years, with eventual disastrous results. Year after year for decades, every nesting female and every nest can be killed on a nesting beach, and still, against any reasonable expectation, hawksbills will continue to crawl out on the nesting beach. What appears to be astonishing resilience to total exploitation is in fact not resilience at all, but merely the harvesting of 20 to 40 years worth of subadults as they become sexually mature and venture onto the nesting beach for the first time. Of course, if total exploitation is maintained for the duration of the immature period, the supply of subadults reaching sexual maturity will be exhausted and the population will come to an abrupt end. Fortunately, humans are rarely so tenacious of purpose.
Events intervene to disrupt the total harvest, and a few turtles manage to reproduce in peace.
Thus, delayed sexual maturity also has a positive effect as a buffer against extinction. This buffer has not been sufficient to protect all hawksbill populations from extirpation, but undoubtedly many more populations would have been lost if age at sexual maturity was five years, as total harvest on the nesting beach for only five years could then extirpate a population. This buffer, however, not only has the positive effect of delaying extinction, it has an equivalent, negative effect of delaying the rate of population recovery. Management programs initiated on nesting beaches will not yield results in the form of increased numbers of nesting hawksbills for several decades. The fourth and final concept, or misconception, that has delayed our acceptance of the dire straits of the Caribbean hawksbill populations has been the impression that we do not have sufficient knowledge of hawksbill biology to judge their status accurately.