The University of New Orleans has been awarded an 18-month $200,000 grant from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation to protect sea turtles.
The project is aimed at improving a device used on shrimp boats.
That device is called an “excluder.”
It allows a captured sea turtle to escape when it’s caught up in a net.
Since 1978, all sea turtles in U.S. coastal waters have been classified as either threatened or endangered.
The primary cause of sea turtle mortality was their capture by shrimp trawls in southeast U.S. waters. The excluder device was developed to prevent fisheries from closing and to recover sea turtle populations.