We said goodbye and hung up, but I wasn't happy with my advice to her. I wanted to talk more about the interference issue, so I called her back. We have already affected the natural world so much that there is no escape from human influence, whether it is compromised air, water or the landscape. It is an obligation that we help in any way we can. I said I thought the best approach was to think before we act, and then to do what informed compassion suggests.
Turtles have a struggle.
They experience low nest success and a high juvenile mortality rate. Once turtles are sexually mature, generally between five to twenty years, their natural survival rate is high. There are few predators capable of successfully killing an adult turtle. The adults are long-lived, and luckily so because it may take a turtle an entire lifetime just to replace himself or herself with one new turtle before death. Furthermore, while some limited dispersal occurs by juveniles, adult females are often faithful to a particular area for nesting and local population extinctions may occur when adults die prematurely without replacing themselves.