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What does it take to save a species on the edge?
From the iconic television show, Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom, comes Back From the Brink, a podcast celebrating the most remarkable comeback stories in the natural world. We meet endangered species that were nearly lost –– some down to their last dozen or hundred –– and learn how they found their way back. Each episode goes deep on a single species and the scientists, conservationists, and unexpected heroes at the forefront of environmental conservation who fought to save them.
About the Hosts:
As a wildlife ecologist, Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant has expertise in uncovering how human activity influences carnivore behavior and ecology. Dr. Wynn-Grant is a recipient of the prestigious Gracie Award, which focuses on women who are making positive change and who further the discussion of what a fulfilling career in media looks like. Honored for her work on Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom Protecting the Wild, Dr. Wynn-Grant continues to inspire with her passion for wildlife conservation and storytelling.
Peter Gros is a veteran wildlife expert and educator. As the co-host of the Emmy® nominated series, Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom Protecting the Wild, and narrator of the Back from the Brink podcast, Gros shares conservation success stories and brings a message of hope to motivate audiences to take action in protecting wildlife and their habitats. Gros joined the original Wild Kingdom team in 1985, co-hosting alongside Jim Fowler on the classic series and Mutual of Omaha’s Spirit of Adventure.He has nearly 30 years of field experience with captive wildlife, establishing breeding programs for endangered animals and rehabilitation programs for birds of prey. As a USDA licensed exhibition exhibitor and animal educator, Gros has shared his experiences across the U.S. through the Wild Kingdom Kids Summit, talk show appearances and lectures. He also serves on the board of directors of the Suisun Marsh Natural History Association and is a trustee for the Cheetah Conservation Fund.
About Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom:
Since its network television premiere in 1963, Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom has been one of the most loved and respected wildlife programs in television history. The Daytime Emmy® nominated Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom Protecting the Wild, now airing weekends on NBC’s “The More You Know” time block, celebrates stories of conservation success, including the great work of caring, compassionate experts and how they are making a positive impact on the Wild Kingdom. For more information about Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom, visit www.wildkingdom.com
8d5eeaf0-9a82-11f1-bf8d-43bb59733871
(gentle music)
- In the warm waters
off the Florida coast,
a green sea turtle propels
herself through the ocean
with her large paddle-like flippers.
At 300 pounds
and with a carapace that's
almost four-feet long,
she's remarkably graceful.
And today, she started an immense journey.
(water waves loudly)
(gentle music)
She's leaving her feeding
grounds to travel hundreds,
maybe thousands of miles
back to where she herself
was hatched, where she'll mate
and lay hundreds of eggs this season.
(gentle music)
It's a process that is filled
with obstacles already,
but for the past 60 years, nesting
and survival into adulthood
has been a minefield for the species.
Decades of habitat loss, egg harvesting
and overpoaching by humans
has dealt a catastrophic blow
to green sea turtle populations.
By the 1970s, their global numbers
had declined by up to 67%.
But today, the picture is very different.
This is the story of that
extraordinary rebound
and the international effort
to make sure it happened.
(gentle music)
(loud sound of water waves)
- When we lose a species,
we lose a little piece of ourselves.
We lose a piece of our
humanity, our dignity.
When we can learn from our mistakes
and see this creature that has been here
long before humankind has been
by tens of millions of years
and give it a chance
to do it as it has done
as a species, we are the better for it.
- [Peter] Today, we'll
hear this remarkable story
from Jeff Corwin.
- You likely know Jeff as the host
of Emmy winning shows
like "Wildlife Nation"
and "Ocean Treks."
He's a wildlife biologist,
a television presenter,
an author, and a
passionate conservationist.
Jeff has worked closely with
sea turtles across the Americas
and in the Caribbean.
(intense music)
Welcome to "Back from the Brink"
from Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom.
I'm Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant.
- And I'm Peter Gros, wildlife expert.
- And in each episode,
we're looking at some
of the most incredible
comeback stories in nature
and the people who made it happen.
- Jeff Corwin has spent
over 30 years working
with sea turtles around the world.
And in that time, he's watched
something amazing happen.
A species that was critically endangered
when he started his
career is now thriving.
But before we get to the compact, we need
to understand more about
this fascinating animal.
- Welcome, Jeff Corwin.
This is so exciting for me.
- Thank you, Rae.
I appreciate that.
- [Dr. Rae] Welcome to
"Back from the Brink."
- Yeah.
- And you know,
we could talk about
pretty much any species
of animal with you.
I mean, you've seen almost all...
But I actually am very glad
that you're going to talk
to us about green sea turtles
and the trajectory they've had over time.
- Sure.
- And one of the reasons I'm so stoked is
because just last December,
I had my first experience
with a green sea turtle.
I was in Costa Rica with
Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom
protecting the wild.
We were doing all kinds of stories,
but we were also looking
at the different species
of sea turtles-
- [Jeff] Right.
- in that area.
And so I got to actually see some up close
for the first time, which
was really excellent.
So I wanna know,
why is this the species
we're talking about?
Like what is it about them
that gets you so excited?
- Well, I love sea turtles
and as a kid growing up in New England,
we didn't see a lot of sea turtles.
- Yeah, sure.
- And when I was a little boy,
my dad was a Boston police officer
and he would drop me off at
the New England Aquarium.
And they were like, "Who's
this little seven-year-old,
eight-year-old kid here every weekend?"
And I like could...
I knew all the names of the creatures.
And before you know it, I was
helping them do assessments,
health assessments on
their only sea turtle,
which is Myrtle the Turtle.
And she is still there today.
- Is she?
- She's one
of the oldest giant well-fed
Reuben-esque sea turtles
you'll ever see
and she's thriving there at
the New England Aquarium.
But since then, I've had a
chance to work with sea turtles
all around the world and I've worked
with almost all the sea turtles.
- So, okay.
For many people out there
who are not like you
and me and kind of in it
with wildlife all the time,
a sea turtle is a sea
turtle is a sea turtle.
So can you talk to me about
what a green sea turtle looks like?
Is it kind of like how a
brown bear is actually brown?
Or is it more like how a blue
whale is like kind of blue
but a little bit more gray and dark?
Like what does this green
sea turtle really look like?
- Well, they don't look green.
- Yeah.
- At all.
- Thank you.
- So do you know why they're
called green sea turtles?
- I don't.
- Because of their meat.
Because when you would eat
the flesh, the muscle tissue
and fat tissue is green
because of all the foraging.
They forge in a lot of
alginous type material
and they're absorbing
that chromatophore type,
the pigments.
They're absorbing that.
- The fact that green sea
turtles are named for the color
of their meat explains why some
of their population crashed.
Over the course of Jeff's
career, he's been a witness
to the sea turtle's journey
and the many factors leading
to the crash and the comeback.
- In my career, I've seen
the arc of sea turtles.
So I'm going on over
30 years in my career.
And when I began my career,
sea turtles were very
critically-endangered.
And now I can see sea
turtles when I'm out fishing
in the summer off Massachusetts.
We have sea turtles.
- No.
I didn't know it was that good.
- Yes.
So green turtles were
critically-endangered,
loggerheads critically-endangered,
leatherbacks,
all the sea turtles were
critically-endangered.
Some now are endangered.
But like loggerheads are,
have drifted their way
into threatened status.
And green turtles are probably,
many scientists would say
are no longer threatened.
They're very abundant.
And a lot of that came down
to was eliminating the hunting
of sea turtles because they were a food
and they still are a food for
many people around the world,
including Costa Rica.
And having this global
mission to make people
wanna protect them, have them sort
of be ambassador species that we can love
and then protecting and restoring habitat
and protecting the
oceans where they foraged
is what allowed us to bring them back.
And if you were to go to
Boca Raton, for example,
40 years ago, they had
a dearth of sea turtles.
Just a couple would come up and nest.
But now Boca Raton, Florida is probably
the most important nesting
site for sea turtles,
especially loggerhead sea turtles.
But green turtles have made
an extraordinary recovery.
So in the short-term, in the midterm,
sea turtles are doing incredibly well.
The long-term, we don't know
because they're facing other challenges.
But where I live in New England,
because our waters have
gotten so warm and also
because they are cleaner
than they have been
in 100 years, Boston Harbor
was the dirtiest modern
urban waterway in the world.
- I believe it.
- It's now the cleanest modern waterway.
- Way to go, Boston.
- Brought back the right whales.
It brought back.
- [Dr. Rae] Uh-huh.
- It brought back turtles
that would now could migrate
up because it doesn't get cold.
- [Dr. Rae] Uh-huh.
- But eventually, it does get cold
and they get cold-stunned.
- [Dr. Rae] Oh.
- So we have a whole sea turtle
hospital in New England now
that back in the day would
get five patients a year
and now they get thousands
of patients a year.
And the other challenge
with sea turtles is
because the sand is warmer, nests
with many species,
including green sea turtles,
are hatching out about 90% female.
- Oh interesting because the
temperature of it's like kind
of the incubation temperature
helps determine the sex of the animal.
- Hotter means girls.
And colder means guys.
And then it's reversed with crocodilians.
- Because why not?
- [Jeff] And why not?
Yeah.
- Because that's just how nature is.
- So I don't know how
you fix that problem.
So on the short-term, they're trying
to do things like regulate
the nest temperature,
but truly recovered species
are when we can sort
of step back and say like wild turkeys,
you're doing it on your own now.
You're doing good.
Or coyotes or other species,
American alligators.
- [Dr. Rae] Yeah.
- Bald eagles, species that were once
almost extinct,
but now have recovered to the point
where they are doing it on their own.
- The Endangered Species
Act gave the sea turtles
legal protection, but law
alone doesn't save a species.
What happened in Costa Rica showed
what protection actually
looks like on the ground
and who has to be a part of it?
- The animal plant, we'd go to a market
and buy these sea turtles and release them
and go out with this
guy to buy sea turtles.
And Costa Rica, their
nesting green turtles
and their loggerheads in the leatherbacks
had largely crashed
because people were
both eating the turtles
and eating the eggs.
- Wow.
- And once they protected
those beaches, they now have
so many sea turtles that they will say
to the local population, "Please
don't eat the sea turtles,
but we have managed these nests so well,
you can have some of the eggs.
You get to have 20% of the eggs."
- That really speaks
to some great recovery
because allowing people to
use these natural resources
in their traditional way is fair
and also speaks to how resilient some
of these species really can be
if they have the right intervention.
- Right.
And with sea turtle eggs, there's a lot
of cultural importance,
especially in Latin America.
They would just go and
dig up all the eggs.
They just didn't have a chance.
And once those nests stabilized,
they were like, "It's okay.
We can share this resource
because we're already beating the odds."
Because it already is a game
of numbers for sea turtles.
Like one, if you're lucky, one in 10,000
- Survives.
- will come back as an adult.
- Walk me through that life cycle
from where it's born.
- Yeah.
So when the sea turtle,
when the mom, she comes out
and she excavates that nest
out to deposit her eggs
and she may, during that
season, she'll do multiple nests
and she'll do like a decoy nest
to kind of do kind of sloppy
that kind of fool the animals.
- Clever.
- The idea is you do multiple nests so
your entire clutch isn't lost.
And then, you know, she's
laying between 30 and 70 eggs.
- [Dr. Rae] Okay.
- Little bigger than a ping pong ball.
And then she goes back to sea.
When she comes out to nest, she
is nesting on the very beach
where she was born.
- Amazing.
- Where her life began.
And she is the only time a sea turtle
for the most part with
few places like Hawaii
will have this phenomenon of sea turtles
that actually will sleep in the beach.
Most sea turtles become pelagic.
A sea turtle born
that hatches out on
Florida may find its way.
We've tracked them to the coast of Africa.
- [Dr. Rae] Oh my gosh.
- [Jeff] Sea turtles from Africa
have shown up beating in the horn
of Cape Cod, Massachusetts.
- [Dr. Rae] Incredible.
- So they are incredibly adaptive of using
the ocean's currents to go from A to B
or go from the new world to the old world.
- And we can find them in all
of the oceans essentially, right?
- We can now, we even
have some sea turtles
that go into the Arctic.
- What?
- You know, we think of sea
turtles as being cold-blooded
and not being warm-blooded,
being endothermic.
But they are the only
turtle that is megathermic
because they are so big
they are like their own uni,
they're a closed loop energy system.
So the nest is laid there
and she will go back to sea
and only the females will come out.
Males will spend their
whole lives in the ocean.
- At sea, isn't that something?
- And when they hatch out, you know,
if they're lucky enough, if
they're that one in 10,000
that survive the flood, that
survived that high-tide,
that survived the
coyotes, of the raccoons,
that survived the ghost crabs
and all the fish that will eat them,
then they'll come back 20 years later.
It will take two decades for
that mom to come to the beach,
excavate that nest out and
bring that next generation in.
So that's kind of how the cycle works.
- The recovery of the green sea turtle
didn't happen by accident.
It happened because
people decided it would.
But the threats that nearly wiped them out
haven't disappeared and
some new ones have arrived.
- So green sea turtles
were listed on the
endangered species list.
And that made a big
difference, at least in the US
and in North America in their protection.
And you know,
and I think it also made
a difference worldwide.
- It did because they were
protected internationally.
The IUCN and other groups.
And there was a tremendous...
There's still places where
people eat green turtles
and other sea turtles.
The green turtle is the one
that's actually eaten the most.
People don't eat leatherbacks.
- And they're eating this green meat.
- Yeah.
(laughs loudly)
- I can't get over that.
- It's like that's what they
say is I've been to places
where I've seen it being cooked
in the streets of Indonesia
and other places.
But that was the most hunted sea turtle.
They would hunt them for their eggs.
And sometimes, they would
just literally get them all
on board, cut them open, remove the eggs.
And you can look at those old
National Geographic photos
and you don't really see that anymore.
But they still face future challenges.
One is a warming world.
- Yeah.
- And how do we combat that?
And the other are plastics.
- Okay.
Talk to me about plastics in the ocean.
- Yeah.
We dump 10 billion pounds of plastics
every year into our oceans.
And you can see that as blue
as a beautiful bluebird
morning in New England.
I've been to the Trash Pacific
Gyre and I've seen that
and where you see something
that looks like an island
that is hundreds of miles in
size of this gyro of trash
that has all come together.
And there are places where beautiful Bali,
for example, you go there and
they have to every day they,
because people have spent all
this money to be a tourist
and beautiful Bali.
They have to come in with excavators
and front-end loaders every morning
just to clean the trash off the beach.
And that is a preventable thing.
It is something we could mitigate.
So that's the good news.
If we decided, we could limit almost all
of the plastic trash that
goes into our oceans,
there's a way we could manage that.
But it's been documented that one
like big landscape plastic bag,
you know, those plastic bags
that's really tough.
- Yeah.
Yeah.
- Can kill five individual sea turtles
- [Dr. Rae] Just one.
- Before it's broken up
enough into little pieces
that it could pass through.
And I have been to so
many sea turtle hospitals
where that is it.
So you have them eating plastics.
And then off Florida boat
strikes, big problem.
And then they have diseases
that may be the result
of climate change, may be
the result of pollution.
They have a, it's a papilloma-type virus
where they get these tumors
and they'll often get them in
and they'll remove the tumors and stuff.
So they have challenges.
But overall, I don't
like to look at things
as good news or success.
I would say it's a promising story.
- Okay.
- It's a hopeful story.
We are at a place of uncertainty
and hope with green sea turtles
and all the other sea turtles
that we have out there.
What I would argue, we are there
where we have this out
of sight, out of mind.
Oh, we fixed it.
- Sure.
- We live in a world now
where whether you like it
or not, in the last century,
humankind has consumed
70 to 80% of all our planet's nature.
We, whether we like it or not,
have been given this responsibility
to be our planet stewards.
- [Dr. Rae] Yeah.
- And that is something
that will always require vigilancy.
- The way I'm interpreting
what you're saying is that
if you are committed to
protecting sea turtles
or wildlife, you know, nature at all,
it's not a single decision.
So it's not just choosing a paper straw
over a plastic straw.
It's not the right thing
to get your paper straw
and then the next car you buy
is a huge gas guzzler, right?
It is a lifetime kind of readjustment
and commitment to these better
environmental practices.
It is the way you vote.
It is the community that you live in.
It is, you know, bringing the-
- The businesses you support.
- The businesses you support.
- [Jeff] Farmers.
- It's bringing that reusable bag
and eliminating single use plastics.
It's talking to your friends
and family who might not be
politically-activated to,
you know, research their candidates.
It's the way you travel.
It is this commitment.
And it's not too hard.
That's not to say like it's
overwhelming and it's too hard.
It actually can become-
- Well, if it is too hard,
you can't do it.
It's not, it's not sustainable.
So it has to be something
that you can achieve
reasonably in your life.
It's like the 5% rule.
It's 5% of everything in
your life to give, to take,
to manage time, talent, treasure.
It's that 5%.
If everyone did that, that
makes a big difference.
- Conservation classifications tell us
where a species stands.
They don't tell us how it got there.
Jeff has been on the
ground for three decades
and his stories say more than
status reports ever could.
- You know, I've always believed
in these classifications
that we have, endangered,
- [Jeff] Right.
- You know, critically-endangered,
vulnerable, least concerned,
threatened, least concerned, et cetera.
I think it really helps us
to triage conservation work.
And at the same time, I
think you've made this point.
It doesn't necessarily
point us to the future.
So when we have an animal
that is of least concern,
they are abundant, maybe
they've gone through a lot,
but they've arrived at this place
where they're doing pretty well.
It doesn't actually secure
them for a future of abundance.
And so I appreciate people like you
who have this articulation
for the work isn't done yet.
- And what you have to
remember is that creatures
that are critically-endangered today
or extinct were once abundant.
- Abundant.
There you go.
- Passenger pigeons were abundant.
The heathen was very abundant.
And that's what created conservation,
when we wiped out wild turkey.
So again, a sign of success like green,
where green turtles are today.
If you went to New England 100 years ago,
there were no wild turkeys.
They were eaten up.
There were no white, very
few white-tailed deer.
And now these are very abundant species,
very abundant resources.
And there are places now where turkeys
are now worth-thriving, but
then they're in trouble again
because of bird flu and other things.
So, you're right.
We're never really out of the woods
where humankind envelops everything
with such a completeness.
We constantly have to be vigilant.
But yes, we have gotten
to a point where species
like green sea turtles,
which were on the brink
of disappearing, have
recovered swimmingly.
And that is something I have
experienced in my own life.
- You know, you have been on
TV speaking about the power
of nature and wildlife
conservation for decades
and you've changed so much.
You've been hugely influential.
Is there a particular sea
turtle story that you'd like
to share with me that just
stands out either from filming
or something that happened off camera?
- There have been so
many sea turtle stories.
Some mishaps.
- Oh.
- So we had this sea turtle,
this big Ridley sea turtle,
probably weighed about 100 pounds,
and it had lost all four of its flippers.
- Poor thing.
- So we were,
had drained its enclosure to clean it
and I was gonna go grab the turtle.
I was leaning, talking to my cameraman.
I was leaning on the edge of this thing.
It's about chest high and the
sea turtle, the water is gone.
And this is about half
the size of this room.
And without any flippers, that sea turtle
managed to come over and
bite-off the tip of my toe.
- Oh my God.
(laughs hilariously)
- And I wielded in pain.
- I shouldn't laugh.
I shouldn't laugh.
- And I was like, "Oh my gosh."
And I turned around and
there's blood everywhere
and this sea turtle trying to eat my foot.
(laughs happily)
And so-
- And it's, I mean, I can't even imagine
how it's moving towards you.
- Like one toe that's the longest.
It was like whatever toe and
it like cut-off the tip of it.
And so that I was like, "Man,
you're one determined turtle."
And then, so that was one story.
And then the other story
was I was in Borneo
and I'd waited all night for this,
this nest to hatch out.
We were gonna film it hatch out.
And lo and behold, it starts to happen
and you see them coming out.
And it was sunrise coming
up and they're going in.
It was so beautiful.
We're filming it up.
And there was like, and
then they're all gone.
And then I look at the nest
and there's this one straggler
and its flippers, not deformed,
but it's just not right.
It's just the straggler.
And you just know it's
probably not gonna make it.
And it was really very
emotional for me to, just to
watch this thing kind of trying
to keep up with the other guys.
And that was like emotional
for me to see that.
- [Dr. Rae] Sure.
Yeah.
- And so that was one incredible moment.
Or dealing with these
cold-stunned sea turtles
that have come to New England to eat
the bounty of plenty in the oceans.
And then winter does come,
comes later, but it does come
and they get cold-stapped.
And all of these people,
little old ladies coming up
and we found this sea
turtle and it was dead
and we brought it back to the center
and we had it there.
And it had no, it was completely cold.
It was as cold as the ice.
It had no heartbeat.
It wasn't breathing.
And the scientist said
"You know, I like to wait."
But we went back the next
day and it had a heartbeat.
(shocks loudly)
It was that determined.
And we released that turtle back
to the wild many months later.
So that's the resiliency of nature.
- The comeback is real, but
ask Jeff Corwin why it matters
and the answer has
nothing to do with data.
- I just months ago, again in
Costa Rica, was looking at,
well, I was waiting on
this beach with my co-host
and we were waiting for
Jaguars, waiting for jaguars.
And lo and behold, a wave sweeps up
and there's a green sea
turtle female obviously
coming onto the sand to
lay eggs for her nest.
You know, I had been snorkeling
with sea turtles before.
And so I have seen them
just be fast, you know,
just super fast in the water and agile
and just amazing, like
hard to keep up with.
And she comes in on this wave,
riding the wave pretty fast
and then kind of splat on the sand.
And then suddenly, I see
this massive body just,
(reenact a water animal amazingly)
you know, using both of her flippers.
And to me, this is a bit of,
you know, anthropomorphizing.
- [Jeff] I know where
you're going with this.
- The animal, it seemed
like she was exhausted
and just kind of, you
know, I'm a mother myself,
just mom to mom.
I was thinking to myself, she's so tired
and she's just, "Ugh", trying
to get from the shore into
the brush where she can,
you know, lay these eggs.
And it just took her like
10 minutes, you know,
to get somewhere where
if she was swimming,
would've been seconds.
- Right.
- And I just had this
compassion and empathy
for the sea turtle in that
moment thinking to myself,
you know, what a labor of love
because there are predators
on this beach, you know?
There are humans on this beach.
There are seagulls
and, you know, all kinds of things
to eat her babies or to bother her.
And yet she has to make
her way with her heavy body
to lay the eggs and
then make her way back.
And I was just, I, you
know, I just felt like
so much compassion for that experience
and for the fact
that sea turtles have been
perpetuating their species
for millennia, you know, in the same way,
but with the extreme effort.
- For hundreds of millions of years.
- Hundreds of-
- That sea turtle in when she comes up,
this is a creature that's
designed to have buoyancy
where all the heaviness
of being a 200 pound animal-
- Disappears in the water.
- Disappears in the water.
- Yeah.
- But then it's like
landing on a planet of all that gravity.
It has to come out without, you know, with
that heavy gravity and fight with the sand
and the bugs.
And then-
- And they don't have feet yet.
- The dryness of the eyes.
And then she has to excavate a hole
that takes some hours to create this pit
that's three feet deep and
then give birth literally.
You can hear them, you know,
they sigh and they heave.
And then she has to go back to the sea.
And she's coming to the
very place where her mother
brought her into, "Dad, he's gone."
But she does all that work.
But then she is done and
they are on their own.
It's a game of numbers.
- [Dr. Rae] Yeah.
- She doesn't need 70
to survive.
She needs just one to survive.
And that wonder survive
maybe in her, you know, two
or three times in her entire
life when you think about it.
- Right.
- [Jeff] That's how it works.
- It's really difficult, I
think, to be in the presence
of a sea turtle and not
feel impacted by it somehow.
And now that we have so
many more sea turtles
because conservation has been working,
the public has gotten on board,
policies have been put in
place, we can keep this species
or all of these species alive
around and around forever.
- It's the reward of investing
our time and our energy
and our resources to
bring this species back.
Because when we lose a species,
we lose a little piece of ourselves.
- [Dr. Rae] Yeah.
- We lose a piece of our
humanity, our dignity.
We have allowed under our
watch to lose something
that we've been charged
to protect as a steward.
When we can learn from our mistakes
and see this creature that has been here
long before humankind has been
by tens of millions of years
and give it a chance to do it
as it has done as a species.
We are the better for it.
So yeah, it's pretty
incredible to see that.
And sea turtles are a big part of us.
And the other thing that I
have come to learn, I think
back in the old days, we kind of science
and I think it just made it
easier to harvest things.
We took away emotion
from them, complexity.
We took away any idea of thinking
and we just say they're hardwired to be.
It's all driven by instinct.
Well, we now know that especially turtles
are far more complex behaviorally.
There's stories of sea turtles
that have had bonds to people.
I have been with sea
turtles that I'm like,
"This creature has taken a shining to me."
And I'm not being anthropomorphic.
The more you study them,
the more we don't know what's
going on inside of them.
- Sure.
That is such a perfect way to end
because it offers us so much
interest in what happens next.
There's so much more to
discover and to know about them.
Thus, we can't wait to
see how good it can get
with sea turtles around the world.
- Yeah.
In a world where there's
not a lot of good news,
this is a good news story.
It's also a gateway animal.
It's a creature that can
be a part of your life
in a meaningful way, that can
be your gateway to developing
a connection and a relationship
with our natural world.
- Jeff Corwin, I have to thank you
for coming onto "Back from the Brink"
and talking to us about
how sea turtles have
come back from the brink
and how we are responsible for
their future moving forward.
- Yeah.
- And it has been
an amazing conversation and
I have to thank you so much.
- Thank you.
It was fun.
(gentle music)
- From the edge of extinction
to beaches full of nests,
from boats loaded with harvested turtles,
to Boca Raton becoming one
of the most important
nesting sites on earth.
The sea turtle didn't just survive.
It became proof that when people choose
to protect something,
nature will do the rest.
Green sea turtles have been
making this journey for hundreds
of millions of years, long
before humans arrived on these shores.
They're still here because of
laws passed, beaches protected
and communities that decided this animal
was worth fighting for.
The work isn't done,
but out there, the turtle
is still swimming free
in the wild oceans once again.
This is "Back from the Brink"
from Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom.
(gentle music)
(soft wave of water)
(intense music)
- If you loved this episode
and it sparked something
in you, please follow
or subscribe, leave a review
and send this episode to the
turtle lover in your life.
I'm Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant and
I'll see you next time.
(intense music)
(gentle music)