Protect Sea Turtles 2024 Forever Stamps — Kemp's Ridley and Five More, First-Class Postage

Marine turtles' ancestors have been in the oceans for more than 100 million years. It took less than a century of exploitation and habitat loss to collapse their numbers. These six stamps mark the effort to protect them, and every species shown is listed under the Endangered Species Act. All six depend on U.S. coastal waters for foraging or migration at some stage of life.

The six species and photographers

Gray-green Kemp's ridley (Doug Perrine); black and white leatherback (Rowan Byrne); olive ridley (Solvin Zankl); green sea turtle (David B. Fleetham); mottled orange-brown loggerhead (James D. Watt); brownish-yellow hawksbill (Claudio Contreras).

Layout

The selvage carries a second hawksbill, photographed by Reinhard Dirscherl, with the species names in white capitals to its right. Each stamp prints its species' common name vertically in white at the lower left. "PROTECT SEA TURTLES" runs in large white type on dark blue to the left of the stamps.

Where they live and nest

Sea turtles are among the oldest animal groups on Earth and spend nearly all their lives at sea, coming ashore to lay eggs and, in some places, to bask. Migrations are long — sometimes an entire ocean. In U.S. waters they range from the Gulf of Mexico to New England, along the West Coast, and through Hawaii, the Caribbean and the South Pacific.

Most southeastern nesting happens between Florida and North Carolina, which hosts the largest gathering of nesting loggerheads anywhere in the world each summer. Leatherbacks and green sea turtles also nest regularly on U.S. beaches; hawksbills and Kemp's ridleys in smaller numbers. Olive ridleys do not nest in the U.S. but forage off Hawaii and the southwestern states, occasionally as far north as Oregon.

What a person can actually do

Buy seafood deliberately. Ask where and how it was caught, favor fisheries whose methods do not kill or injure turtles, and use sustainable seafood information networks to check. It is a small habit with a disproportionate effect.

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