Sea turtle conservation programs at nesting beaches, in fisheries, and through rehabilitation centers address individual welfare while contributing to population recovery for all seven threatened species.
Sea turtle conservation involves both individual and population welfare dimensions. Individual welfare concerns include the suffering caused by entanglement in fishing gear, boat strike injuries, ingestion of plastic, and disease including fibropapillomatosis. Rehabilitation programs address these individual welfare harms while also contributing to population recovery by returning reproductively viable individuals to breeding populations. The population welfare dimension includes the existential threat to turtle populations whose decline would eliminate not just individuals but entire evolutionary lineages and their ecological roles. Fibropapillomatosis warrants specific attention — the disease causes multiple disfiguring tumors that impair vision, movement, and buoyancy in affected turtles, causing chronic suffering in significant proportions of green turtle populations in some areas.