Home / Leatherbacks

Dermochelys coriacea —
a species overview

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Ut elit tellus, luctus nec ullamcorper mattis, pulvinar dapibus leo.

A Living Fossil, Built Differently

The leatherback is the largest sea turtle alive and the most far-ranging, and it is built unlike any of its hard-shelled relatives. Rather than a bony shell, its carapace is a rubbery, ridged covering, black and speckled with white, tapering to a point along seven raised ridges. That difference runs deep: the leatherback is the sole living member of its own family, Dermochelyidae. Nesting females average around 155 cm in shell length and weigh between roughly 260 and 500 kg. Adults carry a pale pink patch atop the head, tied to the pineal gland, and their long, clawless flippers and spined throats are built for a single purpose: catching and swallowing jellyfish.

A Body Built for the Deep and the Cold

Leatherbacks are the only sea turtle able to actively regulate their core body temperature, using a countercurrent heat-exchange system in their flippers that lets them stay warm in cold water and avoid overheating on the beach. That same physiology, combined with a low metabolic rate and a large oxygen-storage capacity, lets them dive more than a kilometer down, deeper than any other sea turtle. Their migrations track the seasonal blooms of jellyfish across entire ocean basins, and nesting females favor high-energy beaches with deep water close offshore, exactly the profile of beaches like Playa Grande and Playa Cabuyal.

A Population in Steep Decline

Leatherbacks are listed as Endangered under the U.S. Endangered Species Act and sit on Appendix I of CITES, the strongest international trade protection available. Globally, the IUCN lists the species as Vulnerable, but that single label hides very different regional stories: Pacific nesting populations, including Costa Rica’s, are classified as Critically Endangered, while the Northwest Atlantic population is listed as Endangered. The worldwide picture is stark: an estimated 115,000 nesting females in 1980 had fallen to roughly 34,500 by 1995, and Pacific populations have kept declining since. What was once the world’s largest nesting colony, in Gabon, has also shown a steep recent drop.

Why Leatherbacks Are Disappearing

The threats stack up from the beach to the open ocean. Coastal development, beach armoring, and artificial light disrupt nesting females and disorient hatchlings finding their way to the water. Climate change threatens nesting beaches directly through sea level rise, and indirectly by warming the sand: because sea turtles determine hatchling sex by nest temperature, warmer nests produce far more females, skewing future populations. At sea, leatherbacks are especially vulnerable to entanglement in longlines, pot lines, and other vertical fishing gear because of their large flippers, and they readily mistake floating plastic bags for jellyfish; one review found plastic in the stomachs of nearly 44% of adults examined. Vessel strikes and, in parts of the Caribbean, direct harvest for meat and oil round out the list.

Ground Gained

Decades of protection have made a measurable difference. Turtle Excluder Devices, required in shrimp trawls since 2003, sharply reduced bycatch mortality. Long-running beach monitoring and protection programs, like the one at Sandy Point in the U.S. Virgin Islands, have safeguarded key nesting beaches since the early 1980s, and similar sustained, on-the-ground monitoring is exactly the work TLT carries out season after season at Playa Grande and Playa Cabuyal. Continued nest protection, bycatch reduction, and public education remain the clearest path forward for the species.

Condensed and adapted by The Leatherback Trust from: South Carolina Department of Natural Resources, South Carolina State Wildlife Action Plan 2025, Supplemental Volume: Species of Conservation Concern — Leatherback Turtle (Dermochelys coriacea), reviewed and edited 2024 by M. Pate and J. Schwenter. Full species account and literature cited available on request.