Hawksbill sea turtle

Appearance

The turtle's shell, or carapace, has an amber background patterned with an irregular combination of light and dark streaks, with predominantly black and mottled-brown colors radiating to the sides. Its elongated, tapered head ends in a beak-like mouth (from that its common name is derived), and its beak is more sharply pronounced and hooked than others. A readily distinguished characteristic of the hawksbill is the pattern of thick scutes that make up its carapace.

The heaviest hawksbill ever captured weighed 127 kg (280 lb).

Adult hawksbill sea turtles typically grow to 1 m (3 ft) in length, weighing around 80 kg (180 lb) on average.

Range and habitat

Hawksbill sea turtles have a wide range, found predominantly in tropical reefs of the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic Oceans. Adult hawksbill sea turtles are primarily found in tropical coral reefs. As a highly migratory species, they inhabit a wide range of habitats, from the open ocean to lagoons and even mangrove swamps in estuaries.

One can find them in the seas surrounding Madagascar and Mozambique, and island groups such as Primeiras e Segundas, that include the turtle protection island of Ilha do Fogo. The Philippines hosts several nesting sites, among them the island of Boracay and Punta Dumalag in Davao City.

Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.

Diet and breeding

While they are omnivorous, sea sponges, their principal food, constitute 70–95% of the turtles' diet. Even so, like many spongivores, they feed only on select species, ignoring many others.

Caribbean populations feed primarily on the orders Astrophorida, Spirophorida, and Hadromerida in the class Demospongiae. Aside from sponges, hawksbills feed on algae, marine plants (seagrasses), woody plant remains, mangrove fruits and seeds, cnidarians (jellyfish, hydrozoans, hard corals, corallimorphs, zoanthids, and sea anemones), comb jellies, bryozoans, mollusks (squid, snails, nudibranchs, bivalves, and tusk shells), echinoderms (sea cucumbers and sea urchins), tunicates, fish and their eggs, crustaceans, and arthropods (crabs, lobsters, barnacles, copepods, and beetles). Hawksbills mate biannually in secluded lagoons off their nesting beaches in remote islands throughout their range.

In crisis

The hawksbill sea turtle is a critically endangered sea turtle belonging to the family Cheloniidae. The World Conservation Union classifies E. Imbricata as critically endangered, primarily as a result of human fishing practices. Hawksbill sea turtles nest as far west as Cousine Island in the Seychelles, where the species since 1994 is legally protected, and the population is showing some recovery.

Multi-national initiatives, such as the Eastern Pacific Hawksbill Initiative Archived 2 December 2013 at the Wayback Machine, are currently pushing efforts to research and conserve the population, that remains poorly understood. Biologists estimate that the hawksbill population has declined 80 percent in the past 100–135 years.

CITES lists this taxon on Appendix I. Confirm the current appendix on the CITES checklist.

Hawksbill sea turtle is Critically Endangered on this catalog because that is the IUCN category stored on Wikidata. Confirm the official criteria and any later count on iucnredlist.org.

Sources

Written for this catalog from the English Wikipedia article on Hawksbill sea turtle, Wikidata item Q203538. Family and order context is original field-guide writing about the group, not a copied assessment of this one species. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA. Not an IUCN assessment. Counts, when quoted, can change — confirm them on the recovery programme and on iucnredlist.org.