There are many reasons why sea turtles are going extinct one of them is poaching. The most commonly poached turtle is the green sea turtle, there are also other turtle that are being poached like loggerheads, ridleys, and occasionally hawksbills and leatherbacks. Poaching turtles (Turtling) has been dated back to around 5000 B.C. and was mostly used by the people in Australia and China. The population of female nesting green turtles in 2004 is estimated to be between 85000 to 90000, but this number is likely to have risen since then because of the now more strict laws against poaching sea turtles and their eggs.
There are a couple more reason for the rapid decline in sea turtles and one is pollution, I’m mainly referring to plastics which can leech harmful toxins into the water that can hurt marine life. In 2004, 4 to 12 million tons of plastic and garbage got brought into the ocean, this is still happening and sea turtles can mistake the plastic for other marine life like jellyfish and eat them. If a sea turtle were to ingest a plastic object or bag it would most likely die because its intestines can not handle the unnatural materials. My third reason is a scientist has found a herpes like virus attacking turtles, the virus is mainly found in green sea turtles but sometimes attacks other species. The virus causes tumors to grow on the outer extremities and inner organs of the sea turtle and are labeled as Fibropapilomas tumors, if a sea turtle were to get these tumors it could limit there movement making it impossible to do basic daily task and or disrupt inner body organs needed to survive.
The fourth reason I believe could have caused this decline is people driving there personal water crafts recklessly through the water, when I went for my boaters operating coarse I was taught to always scout the water for marine life which is basically a given especially because we live on the west coast where there is sea life all around. The problem is when most people get there boaters license they forget everything and just try to show off. This “showing off” can lead to a turtle getting hit with a prop and when the props are spinning at 3500 rpm the sea turtle can easily die. One other reason that the sea turtle population was declining is because of poor fishing practice, fishing gear is a very dangerous thing for turtles because they clam thousands of turtle lives a year. A study was once done on 1% of fishing trawlers to see how many turtles were caught for the past eighteen years, surprisingly it was a mere 18,000 turtles. So if that was just one percent of the amount of trawlers in the world that would have to mean the capturing of turtles were in the millions for the past eighteen years which is crazy and almost unrealistic to thing they were releasing but also sometimes killing that many turtles.
You can learn more at: http://www.seaturtleinc.org/rehabilitation/threats-to-sea-turtles/
Life Of A Sea Turtle 