Estimating hatching success of egg clutches is essential for quantifying reproductive success in sea turtles. Thus, proper reporting is necessary to provide meaningful information for knowledge acquisition and management. Here we review how hatching success has been reported in the scientific literature and use our own multi-annual multi-species datasets to explore the best ways for describing hatching success data. Despite no...

The current climate warming is a challenge to biodiversity that could surpass the adaptation capacity of some species. Hence, understanding the means by which populations undergo an increase in their thermal tolerance is critical to assess how they could adapt to climate warming. Specifically, sea turtle populations could respond to increasing temperatures by (1) colonizing new nesting areas, (2) nesting during cooler times of...

East P acific green turtles ( C helonia mydas ), often referred to as black turtles, are smaller and exhibit a lower reproductive output than other populations of green turtles in the A tlantic, I ndian and W estern P acific O ceans. Knowledge of nesting ecology of E ast P acific green turtles is limited to general descriptions. We conducted an exhaustive analysis of the nesting ecology of E ast P acific green turtles at P lay...

Temperature‐dependent sex determination (TSD) is the predominant form of environmental sex determination (ESD) in reptiles, but the adaptive significance of TSD in this group remains unclear. Additionally, the viability of species with TSD may be compromised as climate gets warmer. We simulated population responses in a turtle with TSD to increasing nest temperatures and compared the results to those of a virtual population wi...

The hypothesis that low skin reflectance (melanism) provides an advantage for thermoregulation under cold conditions has received mixed support in ectothermic vertebrates. We selected a model system, three allopatric closely related species of cordylid lizards that differ in skin reflectance, to test this hypothesis. Cordylus niger and Cordylus oelofseni are melanistic and inhabit peninsular and montane areas, respectively, wh...

Within 19 years the nesting population of leatherback turtles ( Dermochelys coriacea ) at Parque Nacional Marino Las Baulas declined from 1500 turtles nesting per year to about 100. We analyzed the effects of fishery bycatch and illegal harvesting (poaching) of eggs on this population. We modeled the population response to different levels of egg harvest (90, 75, 50, and 25%) and the effect of eradicating poaching at different...

Nesting populations of leatherback turtles ( Dermochelys coriacea ) in the Atlantic and western Indian Oceans are increasing or stable while those in the Pacific are declining. It has been suggested that leatherbacks in the eastern Pacific may be resource limited due to environmental variability derived from the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO), but this has yet to be tested. Here we explored bottom‐up forcing and the respo...