We’re excited to introduce you to our newest member of the team, Sabrina Mashburn! Sabrina will be taking over for our communications manager Bethany Holtz, who has done a tremendous job running our social media efforts and Sea Turtle Week program for the past three years. We thank Bethany for her help improving our outreach and growing our audience and especially for her help growing Sea Turtle Week into a worldwide program.

Sabrina comes to us with a tremendous background in sea turtle and ocean wildlife conservation, research, and education. She has a masters in Marine Biodiversity and Conservation from Scripps Institution of Oceanography, runs her own sea turtle conservation nonprofit, is a former biology teacher, and has worked in the field in Madagascar and the US.

Tell us about your experience in science and conservation before coming to SEE Turtles

I was working at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York City as Assistant to the Curator when I started to become concerned with the state of our oceans, around 2006-2007.  After doing some preliminary research, I decided that art would flourish as long as human beings were on Earth, but the oceans and their inhabitants (and the coastal communities that depend on them for sustenance) needed my help there and then. I went back to school, earning my Post-Bacc in Ecology, Evolution, and Environmental Biology, and the rest is history! 

I began my conservation career after Columbia working for the Wildlife Conservation Society as a Teaching Fellow and consultant on their Madagascar exhibit, which led to a job with WCS’ Ocean Giants Program, where I was a cetacean bioacoustics laboratory manager and bioacoustic analyst for two years. During that time, I discovered the first-ever evidence of a Sri Lankan blue whale in Angolan waters on one of our data sets, and was honored with co-authorship of my lab’s presentation at the International Whaling Commission Conference. But after years of listening to the cetaceans (and copious amounts of vessel traffic noise disturbance) under the waters of Angola and Madagascar, I just had to get out into the field and see these animals for myself! This led to my acceptance to the World Wildlife Fund for Nature’s International Volunteer Programme as their first American ambassador to Madagascar’s Southwest region, as well as a wonderful opportunity to be a volunteer scientific diver for both Blue Ventures and WWF. There I was able to help conduct a portion of the first-ever comprehensive survey of Madagascar’s barrier reef system - the third-largest barrier reef system in the world. 

During my time in Madagascar, I fell in love with the Vezo people, their culture, and their deep sense of community. I have since been given the title of “honorary Vezo,” which I hold close to my heart, and am always looking for opportunities to improve the Vezo people’s access to healthcare, clean water, PPE, and nutrition, as well as improved fishing gear, and helping to increase their targeted fish species catch while decreasing incidental take of internationally-protected species like sea turtles and small cetaceans. 

At home in the USA, I started my own fisher-focused conservation organization, SoCal Sea Turtles, Inc., in 2015. SoCal Sea Turtles works alongside NOAA, the US Navy, and other public and private partners, to ensure that everyone on, in, or near the water on the West Coast of the United States knows how to report live sea turtle sightings, as well as how to safely retrieve, report, and release injured sea turtles and report sightings of dead sea turtles to the NOAA Stranding Network. These federal agency partnerships have given me an inside look at how policy around endangered species is devised, revised, carried out, and enforced at the local, state, and federal levels, improving my skill set for conservation work both at home and abroad.

What are you most excited about working on with SEE Turtles?

I have been focused mainly on US-based conservation projects for the past decade since moving home from Madagascar, and I am very much looking forward to getting back out into the field and helping coastal communities in the parts of the world most in need of aid.

Tell us about the first sea turtle you saw or worked with.

The first sea turtle I ever encountered was underwater during my very first SCUBA dive in Honolulu, Hawaii. My dive instructor had me practice my buoyancy skills at a sea turtle “cleaning station” and I suddenly felt like a scientist on her first drive through Jurassic Park. I originally went to Hawaii to search for cetaceans, but once my dive course was over, I had completely shifted my research interests from cetaceans to sea turtles, and haven’t looked back since.

Although whales and their sophisticated social behaviors and vocalizations will always hold a special place in my heart, I have wanted to live among the dinosaurs since the moment my brain was developed enough to understand what a dinosaur was, and I think sea turtles are just about the closest thing to living dinosaurs in terms of their physical presence, if not their genetics and/or ancestry!

What gives you hope for the future with sea turtles?

Sea turtles have persisted in Earth’s oceans for over 90 million years (leatherbacks) and over 60 million years (hard-shelled species), so I am confident that they will exist long after our species has gone extinct, as long as we continue to make small changes in our own behavior on, in, and near their ocean homes, to accommodate their ancient lifestyles.