The largest reptile in the sea: up to 2.6 m (8.5 ft) and 650 kg (1,430 lb), with no hard shell at all. The back is a leathery skin over a mosaic of small bones, ridged into seven long keels, and the front flippers are longer than in any other turtle.
It is warm in cold water. A leatherback holds its body temperature well above the sea around it using sheer size, a thick oil-saturated fat layer, counter-current heat exchangers in the flippers and the heat of constant swimming - which is why this tropical-nesting reptile can feed off Newfoundland and Norway, where any other sea turtle would die.
It eats jellyfish and nothing much else, which is an odd diet for an animal that size: the food is mostly water. It compensates by eating enormous quantities, and its throat is lined with backward-pointing spines that let jellyfish go down and nothing come back up. The same trap catches plastic bags, which is exactly why they kill.
It dives deeper than any other reptile, past 1,200 m, and crosses whole oceans between nesting beaches and feeding grounds. Its numbers have collapsed in the Pacific, and in this sea it is a very rare visitor rather than a resident.
How to recognise it
no hard shell: a leathery ridged back, dark with pale spotting
seven long ridges running the length of the carapace
enormous front flippers, longer than in any other turtle
length up to 2.6 m
Why it's threatened
Residential & commercial development
Commercial & industrial areas · Tourism & recreation areas
Threats to Leatherbacks vary in time and space, and in relative impact to populations. Threat categories affecting marine turtles, including Leatherbacks, were described by Wallace et al. (2011) as:
Fisheries bycatch: incidental capture of marine turtles in fishing gear targeting other species;
Take: direct utilization of turtles or eggs for human use (i.e. consumption, commercial products);
Coastal Development affecting critical turtle habitat: human-induced alteration of coastal environments due to construction, dredging, beach modification, etc.;
Pollution and Pathogens: marine pollution and debris that affect marine turtles (i.e. through ingestion or entanglement, disorientation caused by artificial lights), as well as impacts of pervasive pathogens (e.g. fibropapilloma virus) on turtle health;
Climate change: current and future impacts from climate change on marine turtles and their habitats (e.g. increasing sand temperatures on nesting beaches affecting hatchling sex ratios, sea level rise, storm frequency and intensity affecting nesting habitats, etc.).
The relative impacts of individual threats to all Leatherback subpopulations were assessed by Wallace et al. (2011). Fisheries bycatch was classified as the highest threat to Leatherbacks globally, followed by human consumption of Leatherback eggs, meat, or other products, and coastal development. Due to lack of information, pollution and pathogens was only scored as affecting three subpopulations and climate change was only scored for two subpopulations. Enhanced efforts to assess and reduce the impacts of these threats on Leatherbacks—and other marine turtle species—should be a high priority for future conservation efforts.
Threat classification from the IUCN Red List.
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