Harvesting Sea Turtle Eggs, Costa Rica

Beaches and dunes form a fragile ecosystem that depends on vegetation to protect against erosion. Eggs, hatched or unhatched, and hatchlings that fail to make it into the ocean are nutrient sources for dune vegetation. Every year, sea turtles lay countless eggs on beaches. Along one twenty-mile (32 km) stretch of beach in Florida alone, for example, more than 150,000 pounds of eggs are laid each year.
Threats to sea turtles
Of the seven species of sea turtles, all are listed on the IUCN Red List of Endangered Species as either "endangered" or "critically endangered". Although sea turtles usually lay around one hundred eggs at a time, on average only one of the eggs from the nest will survive to adulthood. While many of the things that endanger these hatchlings are natural, such as predators including sharks, raccoons, foxes, and seagulls, many new threats to the sea turtle species have recently arrived and increased with the ever-growing presence of humans.