Costa Rica’s environmental achievements are well-known. The country is advancing toward carbon neutrality, using renewable energy sources to generate electricity, and protecting more than 25% of its land mass through a system of national parks and reserves. When I moved to Costa Rica to work for the Leatherback Trust, a sea turtle conservation organization, I assumed sustainability would permeate every aspect of daily life, right down to the dinner table.

But even in Playa Grande — the last mass nesting beach in the East Pacific for critically endangered leatherbacks — menus largely feature seafood caught by longlines and trawling nets, fishing practices that have devastating impacts on sea turtles.

Bottom trawlers drag weighted nets along the ocean floor to catch shrimp, damaging seafloor habitats in fragile ecosystems. Turtles that forage on the seafloor, like loggerheads, are particularly at risk of being swept up by trawlers, and becoming part of the 90% bycatch that plagues the industry. Longliners aren’t much better. A 50m fishing line, outfitted with baited hooks on secondary lines, meant to catch mahi-mahi (also called dorado), tuna, and billfish like marlin, swordfish, and sailfish often hook sea turtles and other marine life on the way.

Scientists working in collaboration with The Leatherback Trust estimated Costa Rican longliners captured 699,600 olive ridley turtles, including 92,300 adult females, from 1999 to 2010. Their research linked these captures to a decline of nesting populations at nearby arribada beaches. Another study estimated pelagic longliners set an estimated 760 million hooks annually in areas of the Pacific Ocean traversed by leatherbacks. In just one year, the global longline fleet captured some 50,000 leatherbacks and 200,000 loggerheads.

And here we are in Playa Grande, dedicated to protecting sea turtles on nesting beaches, yet ordering off of menus that feature the same unsustainable options prepared in different ways: shrimp cocktails, spicy tuna rolls, mahi tacos, coconut shrimp, tuna steaks, grilled mahi sandwiches, seared ahi, mahi ceviche and even sailfish masquerading as smoked fish appetizer.

One night, I interrogated a waiter who assured me the seafood was local and fresh but could not tell me anything about how it was caught. So, I ordered another vegetarian casado, wondering how the woman at the table next to me wearing silver sea turtle earrings and her son sporting a tie-dyed turtle tee could be enjoying their seafood dinners. Local restaurants are serving unsustainable fish, profiting from turtle tourism, while contributing to the demise of sea turtles.

If the people of Playa Grande and the Guanacaste region are serious about restoring the turtle populations on their beaches, more attention needs to be brought to unsustainable seafood. Dr. Bibi Santidrián Tomillo, The Leatherback Trust’s Research Director, has shown that protecting leatherback nesting beaches alone cannot offset high mortality from destructive fishing (Santidrián Tomillo et al. 2008). If not for saving an endangered population, then from an economical standpoint. The turtle tourism and surfing industries bring in thousands of tourists every year to Playa Grande, and without a healthy ocean, the income from these visitors will cease to exist.

Beyond protecting nesting beaches, The Leatherback Trust also works to limit fishing threats to leatherbacks and other sea turtles through Front for Our Seas, a coalition of ocean advocates seeking to end destructive fishing in Costa Rica. In 2013, the coalition achieved a substantial victory when Costa Rica’s Constitutional Court banned the issue of new and renewed permits for bottom trawling. In the same year, the Costa Rican government mandated all shrimp trawlers use turtle excluder devices to reduce bycatch. If the Constitutional Court ruling stands, sea turtles will never have to contend with another bottom trawler in Costa Rican waters after 2019.

But there’s more work to be done. Longlining remains legal and prevalent, and threats to reverse the Constitutional ban on trawling permits still linger. As tourists, locals, businesses, we all bear a responsibility not only to educate ourselves and others about destructive fisheries, but also to demand seafood be caught sustainably. You can help. Ask how your seafood was caught, tell local restaurants you want to protect the region’s tourism by eating sustainable seafood, and encourage the government to keep the trawling ban and take on longlining next. It’s up to us to protect our oceans.

This article originally appeared in The Tico Times on May 18, 2016.

On 6 December 2015, I was at Playa Ostional with the Las Baulas research team. We had taken the trip to Playa Ostional to see the monthly olive ridley turtle mass nesting event, the arribada. Our specific mission was to conduct research on epibionts – the animals, such as barnacles, that make their homes on sea turtles’ shells. While measuring one of the nesting olive ridley turtles, a Costa Rican tourist ran up to us and frantically asked if we could help a sea turtle that appeared to have something stuck in its nose. We quickly grabbed our equipment and ran over to see the turtle for ourselves.

On our way to the turtle, I had a worrying thought. Earlier this summer, I had discovered and removed a plastic straw from a sea turtle’s nose and the thought crossed my mind that this could be a similar event. When I saw the turtle and recognized that it was indeed a plastic utensil, I could only think, “Not again!”.

Seeing that the turtle was heading back to the ocean, I asked two of the biologists, Brett Butler and Collin Hertz, to restrain the turtle. As I tested how firmly the object was lodged in its nose; it was clear that it was lodged into her nose very deeply. I had to make a rapid decision about what to do next. We were many hours drive from the nearest veterinary clinic and had no assurance that appropriate treatment would even be available. I therefore decided to remove the object in situ. Using my Swiss-army knife, which I carry with me whenever I am in the field, I grabbed the end of the object. After a few quick pulls, the object came free from the turtle’s nostril. To my amazement, it was a plastic fork.

As representatives from 195 countries meet in Paris at the U.N. COP21 climate change summit, The Leatherback Trust’s Executive Director, Dr. George Shillinger, discusses the significance of climate change for sea turtles and how local communities can mitigate negative impacts.

Sea turtles are excellent indicators for climate change because they are impacted at nesting beaches with higher temperatures, rising sea levels and shoreline erosion as well as at sea where changing ocean temperatures and circulation affect distribution of food sources.

Scientists affiliated with The Leatherback Trust have conducted research on the effect of local climate on hatchling output, climate change impacts on pelagic habitat, climate driven egg and hatchling mortality, and phenology shifts due to changes in sea surface temperature. But more research is needed.

We need to be proactive by forecasting the effects of climate change and protecting turtles from threats as they seek out new beaches for nesting and in the ocean as they follow moving food sources. The Leatherback Trust is working to not only protect turtles where they are now but also where they will be in the future.

Our work to safeguard nesting beaches for critically endangered leatherbacks at Las Baulas National Park is more important than ever. Scientists from The Leatherback Trust are developing innovative techniques to mitigate against negative impacts of climate change on turtle nests.

We are grateful to the community of Playa Grande for taking a positive role to reduce the effects of climate change on sea turtles. By maintaining native forest cover and planting trees along the beach, our neighbors and volunteers help reduce beach erosion and keep nests cool.