The leatherback turtle (Dermochelys coriacea) is the largest living turtle on Earth and the only surviving member of the family Dermochelyidae, distinguished from all other sea turtles by its flexible, rubbery carapace rather than a hard shell. Adults can exceed 900 kilograms and dive deeper than 1,000 meters, allowing them to hunt jellyfish across a wider thermal range than any other reptile, from tropical nesting beaches to subarctic feeding grounds near Norway and Canada.
Leatherbacks nest on sandy tropical beaches across the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans, with major nesting populations in Trinidad, Gabon, and the Kei Islands of Indonesia, before migrating thousands of kilometers to temperate and cold-water feeding areas. The IUCN Red List currently classifies the species as Vulnerable globally, though several subpopulations, particularly in the Pacific, have declined severely enough to warrant higher concern. The primary threats are incidental capture in longline and gillnet fisheries, the ingestion of plastic bags mistaken for jellyfish, egg collection, and coastal development that degrades or eliminates nesting habitat.
Things worth knowing
Leatherbacks are the world's most widely distributed reptile, recorded in waters from Alaska and Norway in the north to the Cape of Good Hope in the south.
Rather than crushing prey, leatherbacks use backward-pointing spines lining their throat and esophagus to grip and swallow soft-bodied jellyfish whole.
A single leatherback may consume its own body weight in jellyfish on a productive feeding day, making the species a significant regulator of jellyfish populations in open ocean systems.
Leatherbacks maintain a body temperature measurably warmer than the surrounding water through a process called gigantothermy, relying on their large mass, thick fat layer, and counter-current blood flow rather than metabolic heat production.
Nesting females return to lay eggs multiple times within a single season, typically at intervals of around ten days, before migrating away and not nesting again for several years.
The Pacific leatherback population that nests in the Kei Islands of Indonesia and feeds off the coast of California has declined by more than 90 percent since the 1980s, according to data cited by the Pacific Leatherback Conservation Initiative.
