On January 19th, Marc Rice and Alejandro Horowitz left HPA to attend the 28th International Sea Turtle Symposium in Loreto, Baja California Sur, Mexico (see: http://iconferences.seaturtle.org/). Loreto, a small fishing village was the quaint, picturesque site of the symposium... somewhere around 800 attendees descended on the area and enjoyed wonderful hospitality, good food and some interesting papers. While there we were able to renew aquaintances, share ideas and plan new projects.

Alejandro and Marc jointly produced a 10 minute video on the green turtle cleaning symbiosis in Hawaii. The video was presented during "video night" on Thursday. Alejandro got up in front of some 350 people and introduced the video in both English and Spanish. He did an excellent job and the production was very well received by the audience. We were particularly happy to see the interest in copies of the video... we basically gave away all of our copies withing a couple of minutes after the presentation... Great Job, Alejandro!!!

Marc Rice presented a paper (co-authored by George Balazs) on the migratory diving behavior of Hawaiian green turtles. The presentation was given during one of the "speed sessions" and, while 5 minutes isn't a lot of time, it does force one to boil the talk down to the most pertinent information... great experience.

There was also an opportunity to take a full day boat trip around Isla Del Carmen during which we saw white-sided dolphins, bottle nose dolphins, snorkeled with California sea lions and saw four blue whales. It was a memorable expeience.

See A slide show of the symposium!