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Turtle Releases

Cayman Turtle Centre has pioneered techniques for successfully breeding endangered Green Sea turtles, hatching and releasing more than 36,000 Centre-bred turtles, from hatchlings to yearlings, into the ocean since inception. Some of those releases are tagged, which allows researchers to establish that these captive-bred sea turtles return to Cayman’s beaches to nest.

This was confirmed by Department of the Environment surveys showing released turtles returning to nest in Grand Cayman and demonstrating that “head-started” turtles do assimilate into a natural environment. Information from these tagged turtles will help quantify the benefits of “head-starting,” a widely used conservation technique of releasing older turtles in the hopes of better insuring their survival in the wild.
Since the Centre began local turtle releases, the sightings of Green sea turtles by divers and residents living along the coast have become more common. Turtles released in the Cayman Islands have also been recorded in Cuba, Barbados, Grenada, Honduras, Venezuela, South-Eastern United States, Panama, Belize, Nicaragua, and Mexico. These results suggest that the Centre’s release programme can potentially benefit the wider Caribbean as well as the Cayman Islands.
Comprehensive studies have shown that nearly all of the nesting wild Green sea turtles in Cayman waters are related to those from the Centre, confirming that these reintroductions are critical to helping turtle populations recover.
All the Centre’s starting stock of wild turtles and eggs were obtained legally through official programs, with the last turtles for the breeding herd obtained in 1975 and the last eggs collected in 1976.

Our Sea Turtle Release Programmes

At Cayman Turtle Centre, it is our goal and mandate to release a minimum of 500 sea turtles into Cayman’s waters annually. To accomplish this, there are four 4 different release methods employed: