Sea Turtles in Costa Rican Spirituality and Folklore: How Does This Influence Conservation Efforts?

Sea turtles are threatened globally. Their conservation requires, not just scientists and governments, but communities as well. Conservationists have been developing ways to reduce tensions between governments, biologists, and local communities. While community-based conservation has been implemented successfully in certain cases, work must be done to acknowledge the spiritual values of nature to garner more support for conservation from local communities. For this reason, we chose to analyze how sea turtles have been viewed spiritually in Latin America and globally throughout history by performing a literature review. Many coastal communities have centuries old spiritual beliefs regarding sea turtles. Furthermore, we conducted a case study in Ostional, Costa Rica, a village known for its sea turtle conservation, as well as its controversial sea turtle egg harvesting. From this study, which utilized surveys and interviews, we learned that spirituality is a motivator for conservation for the people of Ostional. Thus, we suggest that spirituality should be utilized as an appeal for local communities to support local conservation efforts. Governments and scientists should include spirituality in community-based conservation discourse. Further studies should assess how best to apply spiritual appeals in this discourse and its effectiveness overall, as well as among different age demographics.