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247 While Richard Lapidus readied his appeal of the district court’s rejection of Cayman Turtle Farm’s suit, the sea turtle conservationists celebrated their successes. By marshaling the available science and the provisions of the Endangered Species Act and CITES, they believed they had vanquished “conservation through commerce” and advanced preservation of sea turtles through total protection. Almost immediately, they turned their attention to the need for a global conservation strategy for sea turtles, informed by a thorough understanding of the recent advances in sea turtle biology. To make the strategy truly global, they decided to convene an international meeting in Washington, DC, in November 1979, using the conference facilities of the US State Department. The plan was to invite a select group of turtle scientists to present their research findings. Other speakers could assess available conservation methods, including nesting beach preserves, hatcheries and head-starting, and international trade bans. All the dicey utilization issues would be aired, including subsistence hunting and farming, but the focus would be on sea turtle biology, the status of sea turtle populations, and a conservation strategy. Staff members of the Center for Environmental Education, the Defenders of Wildlife, and the US office of the World Wildlife Fund took the lead in planning the logistics and raising travel funds for the invited speakers. The planning committee decided to invite Henk Reichart from Suriname to give the case for farming and ranching. Kenneth Dodd, a newly hired herpetologist at the Fish and Wildlife Service, offered to present a paper reviewing whether mariculture benefited conservation. David Ehrenfeld volunteered to give an overview of the biological and ecological constraints on options for turtle conservation. Archie Carr wrote the first draft of the global strategy.1 Henk Reichart and Joop Schulz were reluctant to attend, given the hostility expressed toward pro-farming chapter sixteen A Global Strategy 248 The Case of the Green Turtle members in San José at a pre-CITES meeting of the Marine Turtle Specialist Group, but Archie Carr assured them that no one would make any personal attacks on their characters or threaten their jobs.2 When Dave Owens, who was now teaching biology at Texas A&M University, got his invitation to the conference, he was happy to accept. He had done quite a bit of research on the reproductive physiology of sea turtles at Cayman Turtle Farm and believed this important line of inquiry was often overlooked by sea turtle conservationists. Reproductive biology, he thought, could be fairly characterized as the new frontier in sea turtle research, much as migration studies had been in the 1950s. He was somewhat concerned, however, that the Washington conference, which was pulled together rather quickly, might preempt the symposium he had planned for one month later, at the annual meeting of the American Society of Zoologists. He was glad the meeting planners had travel funds for him, but he wondered how they had managed to find so much support so quickly. Owens had had a hard time getting funding for his symposium; his National Science Foundation grant proposal got negative reviews, and he suspected that his association with Cayman Turtle Farm was the reason .3 It was true that his ulterior motive in planning the symposium was to get everyone who worked on sea turtles talking about the science again, but he believed it served the cause of conservation. He had learned in 1977 that the 1979 ASZ meeting would be in Tampa, not far from Gainesville. He immediately thought it would be an opportunity for Archie Carr and Carr’s Florida associates to exchange views on the valuable research carried out on the farm by Jim Wood; Wood’s wife, Fern; and the others who had used materials or facilities at the farm. A previous effort to inform the Florida group had not gone well. In July 1976, when Ross Witham, from the marine research laboratory of Florida’s Department of Natural Resources, had organized a meeting at the Jensen Beach campus of the Florida Institute of Technology, over 100 people had attended. It was clear that there was tremendous interest in sea turtle science and conservation, but not everyone was listening with an open mind. Owens gave a paper on his research with John Hendrickson on sex ratios and the endocrinology of green turtles. He had developed a blood test to measure testosterone levels because there was no external way to determine the sex of a sea turtle hatchling. After [3.145.94.130] Project MUSE...

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