Six of the world’s seven sea turtle species are threatened with extinction, facing a combination of human-caused dangers that range from fishing nets to warming beaches. Two species, the hawksbill and Kemp’s ridley, are critically endangered. The threats are numerous and interconnected, but they fall into a few major categories: fisheries bycatch, plastic pollution, climate change, habitat loss, and illegal trade.
Conservation Status of All Seven Species
The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) maintains a global threat assessment for each sea turtle species. The hawksbill and Kemp’s ridley are both classified as critically endangered, the highest risk category before extinction. Loggerheads and olive ridleys are listed as vulnerable globally, though specific regional populations face far worse odds. The leatherback is vulnerable overall, but its East Pacific subpopulation has declined by more than 80 percent over the past 40 years and is critically endangered. Green turtles were recently reclassified to least concern globally in 2025, a rare bright spot, though some subpopulations remain endangered. The flatback, found only in Australian waters, lacks enough data for a reliable classification.
Regional differences matter enormously. A species listed as “vulnerable” worldwide can be critically endangered in a specific ocean basin. The loggerhead, for instance, is critically endangered in the northeast Indian Ocean, the northwest Indian Ocean, and the South Pacific, even though its global status is only vulnerable.
Fishing Bycatch Is the Biggest Killer
The single largest direct cause of sea turtle death is getting caught in fishing gear meant for other species. Trawl nets, longlines, gillnets, dredges, and even crab pots all trap turtles, which drown when they can’t reach the surface to breathe. Before the United States introduced mandatory bycatch reduction measures, an estimated 346,500 sea turtles were caught in U.S. fisheries each year, killing roughly 71,000 of them annually. The Southeast and Gulf of Mexico shrimp trawl fishery alone accounted for up to 98 percent of that bycatch.
Regulation has made a significant difference in U.S. waters. Current estimates show interactions dropped to about 137,800 per year, and annual deaths fell by more than 90 percent to around 4,600. Much of that improvement came from turtle excluder devices (TEDs), metal grates fitted into trawl nets that allow turtles to escape. Modern TEDs are 97 percent effective at keeping turtles out of shrimp nets. But many fishing fleets around the world still operate without these devices, and small-scale fisheries in developing nations are especially difficult to monitor or regulate.
Plastic Pollution
An estimated 52 percent of all sea turtles worldwide have ingested plastic debris. Floating plastic bags look remarkably like jellyfish, a staple food for leatherbacks and other species, and small plastic fragments mix into the seagrass and algae that green turtles graze on. The consequences are severe even in small amounts. Research published in Scientific Reports found a 22 percent chance of death from swallowing just a single piece of plastic. At 14 pieces, the probability of dying reaches 50 percent. At 226 pieces, death is essentially certain.
Younger turtles are especially vulnerable. A juvenile turtle with a shell length of about 43 centimeters hits that 50 percent mortality threshold at just 17 plastic items. Plastic kills by blocking the digestive tract, puncturing internal organs, or creating a false sense of fullness that leads to starvation. Beyond ingestion, turtles also get tangled in discarded fishing line, six-pack rings, and other debris, which can sever flippers or prevent them from surfacing to breathe.
Climate Change Is Skewing Sex Ratios
Sea turtles don’t have sex chromosomes like mammals do. Instead, the temperature of the sand where eggs incubate determines whether hatchlings develop as male or female. Eggs incubated below 27.7°C (about 82°F) produce males. Above 31°C (about 89°F), they produce females. Temperatures in between yield a mix. As global temperatures rise and beaches get hotter, turtle populations are producing dramatically more females than males. Some nesting beaches now produce almost exclusively female hatchlings.
The problem goes beyond skewed ratios. If sand temperatures climb high enough, eggs simply don’t survive. Lethal incubation conditions represent a ceiling that some populations are already approaching. Because sea turtles take 20 to 30 years to reach sexual maturity, the effects of today’s warming won’t fully show up in breeding populations for decades, making this a slow-building crisis that’s difficult to reverse quickly.
Nesting Beaches Are Disappearing
Sea turtles return to the same beaches where they hatched to lay their own eggs, which makes them extremely sensitive to coastal changes. Nearly half of the world’s sandy beaches are currently experiencing erosion, and projections suggest that coastal retreat could eliminate close to half of all sandy beaches by the end of this century. Only about 15 percent of the world’s coastal areas remain undisturbed by human activity.
Coastal development compounds the problem in ways that go beyond simply paving over sand. Beachfront lighting disorients hatchlings, which navigate toward the ocean by following the brightest horizon. Artificial lights from hotels, roads, and homes draw them inland instead, where they die from dehydration, predators, or vehicle traffic. Seawalls and other hardened shoreline structures block female turtles from reaching suitable nesting sites and accelerate erosion on adjacent stretches of beach.
Illegal Trade and Poaching
Despite international protections under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), sea turtles are still hunted for their shells, meat, and eggs. The hawksbill is the primary target of the shell trade because its mottled, amber-colored shell has been prized for jewelry and decorative objects for centuries. A 2019 survey of just nine cities on China’s Hainan Island found 6,208 hawksbill products for sale across 157 shops, mostly bracelets and necklaces sold in jewelry stores near tourist attractions. A follow-up survey in 2020 found the number of products had dropped to 1,821, but the trade remained active and openly visible. Supply routes for these products trace back through the South China Sea and Southeast Asia, particularly Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines.
Egg poaching is widespread in parts of Central America, Southeast Asia, and Africa. Turtle eggs are considered a delicacy or an aphrodisiac in some cultures, and a single nest can contain 100 or more eggs. Even when harvesting is illegal, enforcement on remote beaches at night is extremely difficult.
Why Recovery Takes So Long
Sea turtles are biologically built for slow population recovery. They take 20 to 30 years to reach reproductive age, and only about 1 in 1,000 hatchlings survives to adulthood under natural conditions. Even without any human interference, sea turtles face predation from birds, crabs, raccoons, and fish at every life stage from egg to juvenile. This means that when adult turtles are killed by bycatch, poaching, or pollution, replacing them in the breeding population takes decades.
This slow reproductive cycle also means that conservation successes take a long time to become visible. A nesting beach protected today won’t produce mature breeding adults until the 2040s or 2050s. That makes sustained, long-term commitment essential. The dramatic 90-plus percent reduction in bycatch mortality from turtle excluder devices shows that targeted interventions work, but the full population benefits of those measures are still unfolding years after implementation.