Photo by Kaylam-Pratt on a TIRN Cocos Island Expedition trip.

For Immediate Release, July 23, 2025

Contact: Todd Steiner, Founder & Special Projects, TSteiner@seaturtles.org   

This Shark Week, Turtle Island Restoration Network Calls for Action to Protect the Ocean’s True Stars: As Shark Populations Plummet Worldwide, Advocates Urge Costa Rica to Protect Critical Migration Corridor

UNITED STATES – As millions of viewers celebrate the awe and mystery of sharks during Discovery Channel’s iconic summer series, Shark Week, Turtle Island Restoration Network (TIRN) — a leading ocean and watershed conservation nonprofit — is calling on the global citizens and policymakers alike to take meaningful action to protect these magnificent predators before it’s too late.

Every year, more than 100 million sharks are killed in commercial fisheries*, driving many endangered species — like scalloped hammerhead sharks, whale sharks, silky sharks, and tiger sharks — toward extinction. Yet these same species keep entire marine ecosystems healthy by maintaining the balance of ocean food webs.

“The public’s understanding of the ecologically important role sharks play in maintaining healthy oceans has grown tremendously in recent years, but this has not yet translated to a decrease in fishing mortality. While shark finning is down, shark meat consumption is up according to a recent study*. This Shark Week, we urge everyone who loves these animals on screen to take real-world action to protect them in the wild.” said Todd Steiner, ecologist and founder of the international environmental organization, Turtle Island Restoration Network.

Many shark species are highly migratory and travel outside the territorial waters of any single nation. One of the most urgent opportunities for action to protect sharks is the completion of the Cocos–Galápagos Swimway, a proposed marine protected migration corridor linking Ecuador’s Galápagos Islands with Costa Rica’s Cocos Island National Park. This 396-mile underwater “blue highway” is a lifeline for countless charismatic marine species, including hammerheads, whale sharks, tiger sharks and silky sharks that travel between these UNESCO World Heritage sites.

While Ecuador has protected its portion of the Swimway with a no-take marine reserve, Costa Rica has yet to secure its share, leaving migrating sharks vulnerable to industrial fishing and illegal poaching as they travel the open ocean.

“The science is clear: protecting small islands alone isn’t enough for highly migratory species… If we want to keep seeing hammerheads and whales sharks on our screens, and in our oceans, we need bold action now to protect their entire migratory routes,” Steiner concluded.

Turtle Island Restoration Network has championed this ‘swimway’ approach for decades. Early campaigns in the Gulf of Mexico helped safeguard migration routes for the critically endangered Kemp’s ridley sea turtle, aiding the species’ recovery. Now, the same proven strategy can protect some of the ocean’s most perfectly evolved predators… the real stars of Shark Week.

How Anyone Can Help Conservation This Shark Week:

• Individuals use their voices here
• Scientists sign on in support here
• Organizations join the coalition here

For more information on the Cocos-Galapagos Swimway campaign and to take action with us, visit www.seaturtles.org/the-cocos-galapagos-swimway. Access media for a Cocos-Galapagos press story here.

*Worm et al., Global shark fishing mortality still rising despite widespread regulatory change. Science 383, 225–230 (2024) 12 January 2024.  

Turtle Island Restoration Network is a global ocean conservation nonprofit with offices in California and Texas, whose mission is to inspire and mobilize people around the world to protect marine biodiversity, the oceans and watersheds that sustain all life on Earth.

The United Nations Ocean Conference was co-sponsored by Costa Rica and France took place in Nice in 9-13 April 2025 and TIRN was there to turn up the pressure on Costa Rica to complete the Cocos-Galapagos Swimway.

In the days leading up to the conference, TIRN founder Todd Steiner wrote and co-authored two opinion editorials (op-eds) with scientists in Ecuador and Costa Rica published in two of Costa Rica’s leading newspapers, Delfino (in Spanish) and Tico Times (in English).

TIRN also attempted to deliver more than 11,000 open letters from citizens around the world, 53 non-governmental organizations and more than 348 from 41 different nations, but Costa Rican Consul Generals in Los Angeles and Houston refused to meet with TIRN representatives.

While Costa Rica President Rodrigo Chaves Robles basked in the limelight of the gathering of over 15,000 attendees, as the co-chair of the UN Conference, and spoke in platitudes about how great Costa Rica’s ocean protection actions are, in reality his administration has stalled, stymied and rolled back protections for sharks, sea turtles and other marine species found in its jurisdictional waters.

President Chavez took credit for the 2021 Costa Rica expansion of Cocos Island National Park and the Bicentennial Marine Management Area (BMMA), which together has allowed Costa Rica to falsely misrepresent that it has met its 30-30 ocean protection goal, a a global initiative to conserve at least 30% of the Earth’s land and ocean areas by 2030, agreed to by over 100 countries.

In reality under Chavez, policies to protect the 38,600 square mile BMMA has stalled, as he ignores a multitude of scientific studies indicating the importance of protecting the Swimway.  More than three years into his presidency, the area remains a marine ‘protected’ area (MPA) in name only– with no regulations in place to restrict fishing or other harmful activities that are driving critically endangered leatherback turtles and sharks toward extinction.

Chavez rhetoric at the  UN Ocean Conference was slammed as hypocritical by legislators, environmentalists and Costa Rican civil society. To tamp down dissent, his administration even obstructed renowned Costa Rican marine scientists UN accreditations, having them withdrawn to thwart democratic political discourse (read more here). Some have compared Chavez anti-democratic actions to tendencies now occurring in the US, referring to him as a “mini-Trump.” 

Former long-time TIRN staffer Randall Arauz, now with Marine Watch International, also criticized the Chavez administration for its failure to protect marine wildlife.

“How can the Costa Rican government claim to be protecting our oceans, when they ignore a Supreme Court order to end the fishing of endangered hammerhead sharks and continue to allow commercialization of marine wildlife for the profit of a few and at the expensive of healthy marine ecosystems? Hypocrisy in an understatement. They are in the pockets of the industrial fishing industry,” said Aaruz

Chaves term as President is coming to an end this year, and if he fails to act, TIRN has vowed to make completion of the Swimway an issue in the 2026 Presidential elections.

“Without strict regulations to eliminate fishing along the Swimway, sea turtles and sharks will continue to die on longline hooks,” said Todd Steiner and founder of TIRN.

He continued, “Ecuador enacted protections of its portion of the Swimway in 2021, but to date, Costa Rica has failed to take the necessary actions to ensure the protections necessary to ensure the long-term survival of these interconnected marine ecosystem of these UN Biosphere Reserves. We call on Costa Rica to take immediate action!”

In the meantime, TIRN will continue to increase the scientific foundation underlying the need for the Swimway , while expanding the coalition of scientists, NGOs and citizens around the world demanding Costa Rica take action to protect endangered turtles, sharks and the two of the world’s premiere UN Biosphere Reserves diversity hotspots.

As of 6/25/25

Alert: 11,338

Scientists: 348 from 41 different countries

NGOs: 53

Project 2025 Would Be a Disaster for Our National Marine Sanctuaries & Ocean Ecosystems

By Todd Steiner

According to a new article, https://www.americanprogress.org/article/project-2025-would-be-a-disaster-for-national-marine-sanctuaries/, the extreme conservative blueprint from the Heritage Foundation Project 2025 would put oceans in peril by weakening protections and prioritizing industry desires over conservation.

New analysis from the Center for American Progress reports if Project 2025 were implemented, it would expose 1,370,350 square miles of ocean and freshwater habitat to new threats, including our National Marine Sanctuaries.

There are currently 16 National Marine Sanctuaries, stretching from the Florida Keys to Hawaii, which protect 600,000 square miles of habitat, and several new Sanctuaries are under consideration. All National Marine Sanctuaries ban all extraction of minerals and fossil fuels within their boundaries.

Project 2025 would threaten new and proposed sanctuaries by:

• Opening opportunities for mineral extraction in existing sanctuaries;
• Pausing creation of any new national marine sanctuaries; and
• Radically restructuring the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the agency that manages the National Marine Sanctuary program.

Project 2025 prioritizes extractive industry and giveaways, especially to the fossil fuel industry. A list of additional threats posed by Project 2025 to current US policies that protect environmental and human health can be found here:

https://www.americanprogress.org/?s=project+2025

By Todd Steiner

When the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) allowed the sablefish fishery to expand into designated critical habitat for leatherback sea turtles, Turtle Island and Center for Biological Diversity (CBD) went into action and filed a federal lawsuit challenging the opening of nearly 2,000 square miles of leatherback sea turtle critical habitat to sablefish pot fishing.

The legal action, filed August 14, 2024 challenges the unlawful issuance of a regulation to allow sablefish pot fishing in nearshore waters off the West Coast that threaten this critically endangered species. The motion seeks summary judgment on their Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act and asks the Judge to vacate the sablefish pot fishery Reopening Rule.

The West Coast pot fishery for the bottom-dwelling sablefish — also known as butterfish or black cod — strings 15 to 50 fish pots on the seafloor to a surface buoy.  Leatherbacks and whales can get tangled in the lines that attached the pots to the buoys leading to serious injury and death. The new rule expanded fishing in new areas including crucial feeding areas off California’s central coast in the Cordell Bank, Greater Farallones and Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuaries.  

A simple solution to this problem could be accomplished with a new regulation requiring to convert to new ropeless or “pop-up” fishing gear, see https://seaturtles.org/ropeless-gear-can-help-save-the-lives-of-whales-and-sea-turtles/. The groups are asking the court to vacate the sablefish pot fishery Reopening Rule.

Turtle Island and CBD now await the decision of Federal Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín.

Read the summary judgement here: https://seaturtles.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/46-Pls-MSJ-2024-08-14.pdf

Learn more about the lawsuit and sablefish pot fishery threat to leatherbacks here: https://seaturtles.org/lawsuit-aims-to-protect-pacific-sea-turtles-from-fishing-gear/

Traditional pot fishery gear used for catching lobsters, crabs and some finfish like sablefish, consists of a baited trap set on the bottom floor with a long rope connected to a floating surface buoy allowing fishers to find and their retrieve their traps.  Depending on the fishery, the traps may be left on the bottom for several days before being checked, or worse, the traps are lost and are never retrieved.

There are literally millions of traps with their buoy lines in US waters, and they create a major threat to sea turtles and whales which can become entangled in the ropes and suffer serious injury or death.

Ropeless gear, also called on-demand gear, can eliminate the threat of entanglement and save the lives of thousands of sea turtles and whales.

Here is how it works.

Pop-Up Buoy– The buoy and line are attached to the trap on the bottom, but are released on a signal sent from the boat to the gear, releasing the buoy to float to the surface and be immediately retrieved by the fisher.

Inflatable Lift Bag—A deflated lift bag is attached to the traps on the bottom that inflates from a signal sent from the boat filling the bag and lifting the trap to the surface for retrieval.

Turtle Island is promoting new regulations to require ropeless gear, while promoting less fishing effort to protect all marine wildlife.  Once this is widely adopted in the US, we can promote its use internationally.

Read more about this gear at:

by Todd Steiner