Leatherback Turtle Endangered Status in South Africa Verified

NOAA Fisheries and our partners are dedicated to conserving and recovering leatherback turtle populations worldwide. We use a variety of innovative techniques to study, protect, and recover this endangered species.

The park’s wide variety of ecosystems ... the Giant Leatherback turtles. Go on guided South African turtle tours and witness this giant creature in all its glory. Turtle tours in South Africa promise awesome opportunities to witness these rare and endangered creature...

The information on this page displays mostly FWS data; for additional information on this species, including NMFS regulatory actions such as critical habitat designation or recovery planning, please visit the National Marine Fisheries website (https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/species-directory/threatened-endangered). The leatherback is the largest, deepest diving, and most migratory and wide ranging of all sea turtles.

Variation among global haplotypes of leatherback turtles was first investigated by Dutton et al. (1999). Only 11 mtDNA control region haplotypes with nine variable sites were found for 10 nesting locations worldwide, including five nesting sites in the Atlantic region (Florida, Costa Rica, Trinidad, Guianas, and U.S. Virgin Islands), three nesting sites from the Indo‐Pacific region (South Africa, Malaysia, and Solomon Islands) and two nesting sites from the East Pacific region (Mexico and Costa Rica).

By 1996, the species was uplisted to "Critically Endangered" due to · sharp drops in nesting populations, especially in the Pacific and Indian Oceans (IUCN 2010, 2025). In 2013, the IUCN began assessing leatherbacks by subpopulation: while the global status · was changed to "Vulnerable," ...

The Leatherback Turtle, Dermochelys coriacea, is listed as ‘Critically Endangered’ on the · IUCN Red List of Threatened SpeciesTM. It is the world’s largest turtle and is found throughout · every ocean (it has been recorded as far north as Alaska and as far south as the tip of South ...

Furthermore, it contains just 148 mature individuals and a relatively restricted nesting range. The combination of those characteristics results in the critically endangered listing.

The more extensive internesting movements of leatherbacks (Harris et al., 2015) are now protected by a new iSimangaliso MPA extending 186km alongshore, and ~20-33km offshore (DEA, 2019; Figure 1). Another new MPA, the highly productive Agulhas Front MPA, (colloquially called the “Turtle Tuckshop”), was also in part proclaimed as leatherbacks seem to forage in oceanic frontal areas (Harris et al., 2018) with the uThukela, shelf edge and seamount–associated MPAs also recognised as potentially important for turtles. In a complementary initiative, South Africa has been revising its Ecologically or Biological Significant Marine Area (EBSA) network as part of the Marine Spatial Management and Governance Programme (MARISMA 2014-2020) under Operation Phakisa.

Effective Protection However, not all leatherback populations have declined: in southern Africa, three decades of strong protection have increased the small annual nesting population more than fourfold.