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A Costa Rica scientific tagging project recently got underway at Cocos Island to study its green sea turtle and hawksbill visitors.

Conservation organizations and marine researchers spent some 30 hours going to the island in their search to discover migration habits of these ancient marine animals.

Consider what they do as a kind of working vacation in Costa Rica that perhaps will contribute to preserving these marvelous animals now sadly endangered in much of their range.

The famous mariner, Jacque Yves Cousteau, once described Cocos Island as the most beautiful island he had ever encountered. The small island, less than 10 square miles in area, lies some 340 miles off the Pacific coast of Costa Rica, about halfway to the Galapagos Islands.

It was not the pretty island sunsets and beaches that captivated the Captain. Its beauty lies off its shores, under water, in a place that Costa Ricans have voted one of the Seven Wonders of Cost Rica. It is there that one finds incomparable treasure: vast schools of fish, whales and porpoises and turtles.

Marine turtles have swum the world’s oceans since the age of dinosaurs. Imagine the mighty Tyrannosaurus feeding on them 200 million years ago when they went ashore to lay their eggs on the beaches.

These ancient beings are found in all the oceans of the world except the Arctic and Antarctic.

Once, the sheer numbers of green sea turtle, hawksbill, leatherback and other species were so massive that mariners, lost in the fog, sometimes found land by listening for the sounds of sea turtles paddling towards nesting grounds.

Alas, those numbers are no more. Today, man’s unrestrained coastline development and wanton plundering of their nests have put them at risk. For many years, millions were slaughtered in South America to make stylish Italian combs, and expensive shoes.

Jacque Yves Cousteau once presciently remarked: “If we go on the way we have, the fault is our greed and if we are not willing to change, we will disappear from the face of the globe, to be replaced by the insect.”

However, more and more governments and conservation organizations are working to turn around the decline turtle populations. International treaties relating to sea turtles are now in place, though many countries allow disregard of them. Conservation organizations, scientists, and researchers have begun tagging ocean roaming turtles in far away places like Cocos Island, the Galapagos, Columbia, and other areas. Some animals are fitted with numbered flipper tags while others bear satellite transmitters that are tracked around the clock. It is all part of an effort to track their migration patterns.

We cannot undo the past but the men and women who tag sea turtles have faith that the future is yet to be inscribed.

Victor Krumm writes about tropical Costa Rica. Visit his popular site Costa Rica Vacations or check out one of Costa Rica’s Seven Wonders Cocos Island