Turtles die...

...as the result of commercial fishing operations. A lot of them. That's not news. But a new study appearing in Conservation Letters suggests that the numbers may be considerably higher than we suspected. Bycatch studies indicate that some 85,000 turtles were accidentally taken between 1990 and 2008. Given that the data collected represents a microscopic fraction of the world's fishing fleets, the author's estimate that the actual toll may be as much as two orders of magnitude higher.

Can sea turtle mortality be avoided? Not completely, and there's certainly a cost to the fishermen. Personally, I don't mind paying a little more for my seafood if it means that we don't kill 10 million sea turtles in 20 years.