Life of a Marine Biologist: Saving Sea Turtles and Fighting Plastic
Christine Figgener is a Marine Conservation Biologist. She is devoted to the conservation and study of sea turtles and fights plastic pollution. She talked to Mooi about her journey to the ocean, to science, and to the sea turtles.
“I was already talking about being a marine biologist in kindergarten. Except I was calling it “ocean explorer”. I knew that this was what I love doing” laughed happily Christine, remembering.
Christine Figgener is a Marine Conservation Biologist. She’s been working on the crossroad between conservation and applied science for over 15 years, mainly for the conservation and research of sea turtles. From Germany, she is now based in Costa Rica.
“My claim to fame is a viral video that I published a few years ago, where we retrieved a plastic drinking straw on a sea turtle’s nose. Which kind of gave me an incredible platform to speak about threats to sea turtles”.
She was named Time’s Next Generation Leaders in 2018. Her interview was titled “Ending the Age of Plastic”. Christine does a lot of science communication, speaking to people that are not scientists about what they can do to actually help the conservation of sea turtles.
How it all started
Christine’s parents always liked vacations by the ocean. From Germany, it was pretty easy to go to the Netherlands, or the Mediterranean, for summer holidays.
On the first vacation, she recalls, at 2 or 3, Christine threw a tantrum on the beach because she was too scared of going into the water.
“I remember that my dad got really annoyed with me. He is this very rational german person. So he just walked out to the concession stand and bought me a pair of goggles, and then said, you know what, just look under the water, there’s nothing to be scared of. And that was pretty much the start of me being super fascinated by water. I became what we call in German a “water rat”. I loved being in the water, snorkeling, and swimming” she smiles.
Christine’s dad fostered that interest with Jacques Cousteau and Hans Hass movies. “What really fascinated me about the Hans Hass movies was that the main protagonist in his films was actually his wife, Lotte. She became this female role model that was doing all this ocean exploring, and I wanted to be just like her”.
When people were putting up boys-band posters up their walls, Christine was collecting articles and news strips and posters on whales and dolphins.
The long study road
Now that the target was set, Christine was not about to wait idly. She rolled up her sleeves and set about acquiring the tools she needed in her toolbox to become an “ocean explorer”.
She started by doing an internship at 13 at the local aquarium that had sea lions and dolphins and, of course, was full of marine biologists.
“I was able to dive into this world of scientists and help them with little tasks around the projects that they did. And of course, I could ask them all the questions I wanted, like what do you need to be a biologist. I discovered that English seemed to be very important. I wasn’t very good then, I realized I needed to sit down and learn English”.
She did an exchange year to improve at 16. “A lot of the choices I was making were related to: I want to be a marine biologist”.
Her undergraduate studies didn’t go so well. In Germany, you can’t specialize until you get your master's, so everybody studies the same at the beginning. “I hated my undergrad studies because I did so much chemistry, so much physics and so little biology and things I was actually excited about, that I was really doubting my decision to become a biologist”.
But luckily, a graduate class on tropical marine ecology in Egypt opened up to undergrads, and Christine got in.
“It was the most incredible thing. It was everything I ever envisioned I would be able to do as a marine biologist. Exactly that. We were snorkeling in the reefs, developing our own little scientific projects, understanding how to work data collection, do presentations, and statistical analysis. It was perfect. If that one wouldn’t have happened, I don’t think I would have stuck with biology, I don’t know what I would have become” she looks back.
The same luck happened in her graduate studies. In the uni she didn’t want to join in the first place, on the first day, she saw on a blackboard that they were looking for researchers for a sea turtle project in Costa Rica. She applied, got accepted and went to Costa Rica for half a year. “That‘s’ literally where I was infected with the sea turtle virus, because it is the most incredible thing that I have experienced in my life. There’s a certain magic to it that’s very difficult to explain if you haven’t seen it for yourself”.
Love at first sight
The leatherbacks are the largest of all sea turtles. They’re massive, between 300 and 600kg.
“The first time I ever saw a leatherback nesting…. They’re just gigantic! And if you think about it in terms of a biologist, you also have to think that, that lineage of animals has been around for more than 100 million years, so they have been around with the dinosaurs!” exclaims Christine, amazed.
“So I’m at the beach in Costa Rica. I have the jungle on one side, the ocean on the other, above me there’s this incredible night sky, and I see one of those little dinosaurs laboriously making its way up towards the vegetation. And you’re just there, you’re getting the chills, you hear them breathing, it’s unbelievable”.
The leatherbacks then find a spot where they can nest, move the sand around with their massive front flippers. Once that’s done, all of the sudden it gets really quiet, and only when you get close you can see they use their rear flippers, just like hands, to start digging the egg chamber.
“And you’re amazed. They start laying their eggs, and you’re just sitting there, witnessing the creation of a new generation. Afterward, they’re camouflaging everything so that the babies are protected. Then they’re going into the water and the beach is like nothing happened. It’s just, wow” whispered Christine, sparkles in her eyes. “This was the moment where I was like, ok, this is what I want to do for the rest of my life, this is incredible”.
Sea turtles as sentinels of our oceans
Ever since then, Christine dedicated her life to trying to protect the eggs and the females from poaching. Other species as well.
“I’m trying to educate people on what else they can do besides coming here and volunteering. What they can do when they go back home. Become politically active, try to get involved in policy work. Try to reduce plastic consumption, because there’s so much of it. Be conscientious where you fish comes from, because fishes are another massive problem”.
Help combat climate change, which is a massive problem for sea turtles as well, because the sex of sea turtles depends on the temperature. The rising temperature is creating more females and we don’t know how that is going to affect the population.
“I think sea turtles are like the sentinels of all the things that are going wrong in our oceans. It’s about sea turtles but it’s also about our oceans. I’m trying to connect people to our oceans. But oceans are abstract, they’re not really a personna. Sea turtles are cute and charismatic, they draw people in. I’ve never met a person who doesn’t like sea turtles”.
They help get a reaction out of people, to get them excited about ocean conservation.
Day job and NGO
This is what Christine’s day job is about. She’s working for a foundation that is concerned about plastic pollution. She talks to people all over the world and tries to convince them to reduce their use of plastic.
The other half of her time, she has a small grassroots NGO in Costa Rica called Costa Rican Alliance for Sea Turtle Conservation & Science (COASTS). They have several projects in Costa Rica, although their main project is based in the southern Caribbeans, where they are protecting one large nesting beach that is used by three different species of sea turtles.
“We have this conservation component where we’re trying to keep the eggs safe, keep the female safe. But since I am a scientist I’m also having a research project that is circling around the hawksbill turtle, a critically endangered species where we don’t know much about. I do analysis with tissue samples, and also satellite transmitters. And we do a lot of population monitoring, tap the turtle, try to identify individuals so we know how many individuals do we have in the population, is our population increasing and decreasing, those kinds of things” Christine explains.
A job to keep you in the present
Christine loves her job. Most of all, she loves working with turtles. She likes the physicality of the work. “You never have to worry about working out,” she laughs.
She knows that sometimes, she can be a person that lives a little bit too much in her head.
“During my Ph.D., when I was just writing, all the stuff that happened with me mentally, that was not healthy, and I don’t think that would have happened if I had more physical exercises. My work on the beach here really keeps me in the present. There’s not much room to worry about the future, to get upset about the past, but it’s really about solving the problems in the here and now. And for me and my mental health, this is super healthy”.
So Christine gets up early every morning with her dog Fiona, sometimes to do some survey runs and check the nests, but always to see the sunrise. “It sets you for the day. You’re breathing and letting your mind wander. It starts the day the right way”, she smiles.
Her second favorite moment is sunset, where she’s on the beach, maybe for some excavation work.
“There’s a certain peace that comes over the world. It’s my favorite time of the day everywhere, not just at the beach. Everything gets so quiet. You have those amazing colors. And we sit on the beach and dig out a nest, and we release the baby turtles, and it’s just very peaceful, you have something to do, you have a purpose. It’s beautiful”.
The difficulties of being a woman in science
Christine loves the balance that she’s found. Doing science communication, doing her research and conservation. The best of all the worlds.
“There was a point in my life where I was really worried whether I would be able to do all of that or if I would have to decide for just one. So far I have managed to juggle three! Let’s see how that goes in the future”.
That nice balance didn’t come easy. Retrospectively, Christine realizes that sometimes, she had a harder time because she was a woman. That was for a time one of her biggest obstacles. A woman in science, and everything that goes with it.
“I think us women have a very different way of approaching certain things. Sometimes we are not as aggressively going after things as men. On top of that, I am a foreigner that works in a very sexist country. My first bosses were male, so, there were a lot of clashes”.
One side was cultural: Germans communicate very differently from Costa Rican. “But the other layer of the problem was definitely that on top of that I was female. Men here do not like to be told something, anything, by anybody, and definitely not by a woman and a foreigner”, she reflects.
Christine sometimes battled with impostor syndrome, and still does. She has these doubts in her mind, should she do it, should she not, is she qualified enough, good enough? Recently she had a talk with a male colleague about it. “He’s a great guy. He said maybe you should just think about it that way: every time you’re in doubt about whether you should do something or not, just think about what would a white mediocre male do?” Christine laughs. “If the answer is yes he would do it, then you should probably do it. Just like that. It’s funny but it actually helps me put things in perspective”.
For Christine, accomplishment is not awards and The Time’s Next Generation of Leaders. It’s having a good nesting season and saving a large percentage of the nests. Or going into a school and getting kids really excited about turtles, to the point where, a few weeks later, they tell her about how they changed their cafeteria to not use single-use plastic anymore. “Those are the moments where I feel the most accomplished”.
Our oceans, our species
That’s why her plans for the future are about reaching more people. “We need to reach people all over the world with my message, to connect them to the ocean, to get them excited about protecting our oceans, our sea turtles and reducing plastic”.
For Christine, it is fundamental that humanity wakes up, and realizes that we cannot live without our oceans. About 50 to 80% of the air we are breathing, no matter where we are, comes from the ocean.
“Even though we don’t know much about the ocean … without it we wouldn’t exist as a species. Our oceans are our lifeline. We are investing so much money to explore out of space, to send people to Mars. I don’t want to go to mars! I want to stay on this planet, I want to be with our oceans. To keep this going for our species”.
To her, the stakes are so much higher. Protecting our oceans is about us. “Our planet will survive without us. The question is, will there be humans on it or not”.
Christine is devoted to the cause and will fight for it, one turtle at the time.
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