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Marine Turtle Newsletter 125:15-16, © 2009

Marine Turtle Newsletter-Online

Call for Abstracts on Sea Turtle Headstarting Projects

Russell Burke
Department of Biology, 114 Hofstra University, Hempstead, NY 11549 USA (E-mail: russell.l.burke@hofstra.edu)

I’m trying to locate potential participants in a symposium called “Headstarting Turtles-Learning from Experience” to be held at the Joint meetings of the Herpetologists League, the Society for the Study of Amphibians and Reptiles, and the Association of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists in Providence, Rhode Island, 7-12 July 2010. At this point I am interested in people with direct, long-term experience with turtle head starting programs who would be willing to present papers on their work. I already have a large number of excellent participants, but we are unfortunately lacking in talks concerning sea turtles.

My goals are to encourage people involving in turtle head-starting projects to address academic concerns concerning hard-starting, to compare a series of examples of serious head-starting projects using a common set of criteria for success, to learn which, if any, conservation practices are more likely to lead to success. It is not the goal of this symposium to present head-starting as the solution to all turtle conservation problems, or even to promote head-starting itself. I specifically intend to invite some critics of head-starting to speak, in addtion to head-starting practitioners, in an effort to promote dialogue.