. Saving Sea Turtles
Small-scale fishing performed with nets is one of the most common fishing methods used
around the world. One of the unfortunate side effects of this method is that sea turtles,
which are considered threatened, get caught in the nets along with the fish. Conservation
biologists at the University of Exeter in England recently devised a way to prevent these
sea turtle deaths, which they tested at a fishery in northern Peru. They found that
attaching green LED lights to the nets warned the turtles away, possibly because the
lights made the nets more visible. The number of sea turtle deaths was reduced, but the
number of fish caught seemed to remain the same.