The fishermen are no happier about it than Eckert and his colleagues.

At the fishing pier in the small port of Toco, Shazam Mohammed is skinny, shirtless, and furious. He gestures at a heap of green fishnet, tangled and cut. "All those nets are chopped up," he says—slashed to remove leatherbacks that blundered into them the night before. "If we make 200 Trinidad dollars [about 30 U.S. dollars], we have to pay 500 to fix the nets." The turtles, it's safe to assume, did not fare well either. "Damn leatherbacks. I'm not wasting time saving them—if I catch a turtle, I will destroy it."

Eckert and colleagues from the NOAA Fisheries Service, hoping to find a way for nesting leatherbacks and coastal fishermen to coexist, have worked with local people to test modified nets that catch fewer turtles. Meanwhile more and more of the fishermen are looking for other ways to make a living during turtle season. Even so, Eckert and others estimate that a thousand or more leatherbacks die every year off Trinidad, drowned in nets or hacked out of them by desperate fishermen.

And yet the tide of nesting leatherbacks keeps rising, not just in Trinidad but around the Caribbean—in St. Croix, along the northern coast of South America, even in Florida.

Stopping the slaughter on nesting beaches, as Nature Seekers and other organizations have done, must have helped, says Eckert. "But I'd be hesitant to say there's a direct link between conservation and the kind of increase we're seeing." It's too early, he thinks, for the biggest benefit of beach patrols—saving countless eggs from being harvested and sold—to be paying off. No one is sure how long it takes leatherbacks to mature. But recent research, based on growth layers in tiny bones that encircle the pupil of the leatherback eye, suggests it could take 30 years, which would mean that the hatchlings saved over the past few years can't be contributing yet to the surge of turtles hitting the beaches.

Thousands of miles from the warm sands of Trinidad, something else seems to be going very right for the leatherbacks of the Atlantic.