[UPBEAT SALSA MUSIC] [BIRD CHIRPING] {DAVID YETMAN} Several hours by land south of the great city of Oaxaca,the state meets the Pacific Ocean There, a dimension of Oaxacas extraordinary diversity appears in the ocean water.

[SALSA MUSIC CONTINUES] [WATER SPLASHING] And the people who live nearby.

{ANNOUNCER} Funding for in the Americas with David Yetman was provided by Robert and Carol Dorsey The Guilford Fund Arch and Laura Brown And Hugh and Joyce Bell.

[THEME MUSIC] [CHATTERING] [ACOUSTIC GUITAR] {DAVID} Mexico's state of Oaxaca has become internationally renowned, mostly for its great city with its varied cultures, With its unmatched gastronomy [SPEAKING SPANISH] And with its exquisite archeological sites.

But Oaxaca is also the most diverse state in Mexico, and one of the most diverse regions in all of North America.

[ACOUSTIC GUITAR PLAYING] Oaxacas coast includes the southernmost point of the state near Puerto Escondido, and extends more than 100 miles east and west.

The smaller nearby coastal towns of Puerto Ángel, Mazunte, and La Ventanilla are all renowned for remarkable marine life.

We begin far to the east of Puerto Escondido, in the resort city of Huatulco, with its array of bays.

The area is now served by two international airports and has become very popular with both international and Mexican tourists.

But the preservation of the bays and the forest has set it aside as a place where you can find natural wonders that you can't find anywhere else in the world.

[CALM MUSIC PLAYING] With increased development along the coast inevitably comes increased pollution, and Mexico has a problem with pollution, as does every other country.

In the case of Huatulco, the government has instituted a special program for trying to clean things up and keep them clean.

The Huatulco area has 36 beaches, nine bays and four bays called clean bays and nine beaches called clean beaches, Playas Limpias.

There, the government has seen to it that the sewage water is treated and not allowed to escape into the water of the sea.

It's a small bay, but if four of these can be done and the improvement in the quality of water has been demonstrated.

They know that they can do it with every beach.

It costs money, It takes time, but they have shown that it can be done.

[SALSA MUSIC PLAYING] Prior to the arrival of development in the 1970s, the main industry in this whole region was fishing.

Inland there are crops being grown.

Corn is still a basic inland, but with the arrival of tourism and the Mexican government's desire to preserve the fish stocks and the ocean fauna, they put limitations on what can be harvested.

And many of the former fishermen and their families have turned to tourism.

It has been a difficult change for many, but it has protected the area in a way that it deserved.

[LATINO MUSIC PLAYING] [SPEAKING SPANISH] {TRANSLATION} {REBECA MAGALLÓN} This is the tuna fishs first cousin.

The fishermen fish it every day.

[SPEAKING SPANISH] Welcome to Puerto Ángel This is the boat dock where they arrive and take all our exports to Spain.

[SPEAKING SPANISH] All the coffee growing farmers bring their products down the mountains to this port and fill these boats.

[SPEAKING SPANISH] Communication is hard between the mountains and the coast.

Sometimes things go poorly because they don't know the price.

[SPEAKING SPANISH] [SPEAKING SPANISH] {TRANSLATION} {FISHERMAN} Not all the hooks work Some of them don't catch any fish Every 50 hooks you might catch two or three fish That's why we have this amount But a lot of equipment is a lot of weight.

So there's a certain limit.

Suppose 300 hooks is about five miles of equipment.

For a boat this small This equipment keeps it from being overwheight [SPEAKING SPANISH] [WAVES CRASHING] [BOSSA NOVA PLAYING] {DAVID} The coast of Oaxaca is a especially apt place for releasing captive bred and hatched turtles.

The waters are particularly good, they are not especially warm.

They're cold.

They're very abundant with food.

So once they can make it into the water off the entire coast of Oaxaca, and there are several of these, their chances are much better than if they were released in other places.

Still, theyre mighty slim.

[SPEAKING SPANISH] {TRANSLATION} {MANUEL} We're here in the Escobilla Community and we came to reintegrate two species of turtle hatchlings.

The Golfina Turtle, or Olive Ridley, and the Prieta Turtle, or Green Sea Turtle.

[SPEAKING SPANISH] This beach is a protected natural area.

So three species come out here: Golfina, Prieta and Laúd, also known as a Leatherback Sea Turtle.

The incubation period is 45 days At 45 days they emerge on their own and we have an incubation pen two kilometers away.

Every night we patrol the area and try to rescue the nests with the most gone.

[SPEAKING SPANISH] Unfortunately, there are still people who steal eggs, and that's where we come in.

In fact, all of us involved in the project are former turtle predators.

We all used to steal, collect and sell eggs.

But we made a radical change thanks to a biologist named Jose Vasconcelos, who believed a living turtle was more valuable than a dead one.

[SPEAKING SPANISH] [LATINO MUSIC] And we're already seeing that through the benefits of the project.

The incubation pan accounts for approximately three to to four percent.

In the natural habitat, only one percent [SPEAKING SPANISH] But it's changed.

Ten years ago, only one in every 10,000 turtles was managed.

Now it's about one in every hundred.

[SPEAKING SPANISH] Here there was a natural hatchling and this footprint came from here.

And it was intercepted by a predator that appears to be a dog.

Yeah, a dog came and got it right away.

[SPEAKING SPANISH] There are a lot of challenges here on the beach.

There are birds, dogs, cats, as well as sand.

Sometimes the turtles hatch at one or two in the afternoon and the sand is very hot.

And then in the water there are fish, but we cant do anything about that.

On land we do everything we can, but in the water we can't help.

[SPEAKING SPANISH] {DAVID} Baby almost anything is cute, but there's something especially captivating about these little Tortugas, these little turtle babies.

Part of that is that you know they have a heroic struggle to survive.

They have to make it down into the ocean and then escape thousands of predators.

So the odds of their making it are not great.

But they are so heroic, they're fighting, “Let me go, let me go!

I want to get into the water.” You have to admire them.

A very small percentage of these survive will grow to be enormous.

[UNDERWATER AMBIENCE] And they will swim thousands and thousands of miles living on a diet of jellyfish.

[SPEAKING SPANISH] [UPBEAT MUSIC] [MUSIC FADES] {DAVID} Scientists recently discovered that off the Pacific coast of Oaxaca, two great ocean currents converge, producing a wild diversity of habitats in the ocean and a richness of marine life.

This marine life includes vast schools of dolphins and occasionally whales.

[CALM ACOUSTIC GUITAR STRUMS] We are here in this boat, guided by some researchers from the Universidad del Mar, the Sea University of Oaxaca.

They are here studying the very first monitoring of the warm blooded mammals, the dolphins particularly, and the whales in this area.

They are gathering huge amounts of new data on how they behave and and how they can be protected.

[WATER GURGLING] [SPEAKING SPANISH] {TRANSLATION} {FRANCISCO} Puerto Ángel is a privileged place on the Oaxaca coast.

It's practically on the central coast of Oaxaca.

We're also geographically located in a really interesting area because two important currents converge here.

[SPEAKING SPANISH] [SPEAKING SPANISH] Two sea currents, yes.

One that comes from the south called the Costa Rica Coastal Current So it's currently very close to the coast, whose direction runs south to north.

And then the other current is the California Current, whose direction runs north to south.

[SPEAKING SPANISH] [SPEAKING SPANISH] Exactly.

They join here and end towards the Pacific Ocean.

There are really strong winds that come through the Gulf of Mexico and exit through the Isthmus of Tehuantepec.

Very close to here, about 200km or so.

[SPEAKING SPANISH] And that adds to the marine productivity.

And thanks to that, they have a great diversity of species in our coasts.

Some migratory ones like the humpback whale other local or resident species like the ?

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whale, or the tropical biome as we know it here and many species of dolphins.

So in terms of marine mammals, we're very rich in species as well as birds, turtles and invertebrates.

[SPEAKING SPANISH] — a great marine diversity thanks to the oceanographic conditions that we have here.

[SOFT MUSIC] [WATER GURGLING] [SPEAKING SPANISH] In front of Puerto Ángel approximately seven kilometers we already have 4000m of depth.

So the food chain explodes there due to the huge amount of nutrients.

[SPEAKING SPANISH] In 2012 we started a small program to learn about and make a list of the species that make up the marine diversity in the coast of Oaxaca and here in Puerto Ángel [SPEAKING SPANISH] [WATER SPLASHING] [SPEAKING SPANISH] That monitoring program has helped us go from recognizing 13 species in 2012 to 21 species now 14 species of dolphins, five species of sea lions and three species of whales.

[SPEAKING SPANISH] They have natural markings like a fingerprint.

[SPEAKING SPANISH] [LAUGHTHER] [WHALES VOCALIZING] [WATER SPLASHING] [SPEAKING SPANISH] They have bites from orcas.

We can classify them by color, but they have natural markings which help us identify each individual and know where it goes to eat and where it goes to reproduce.

[SPEAKING SPANISH] So we know that the whales only travel here to Central America when the migratory season for reproduction begins, and then they return and go north.

This is exclusively an area of transit.

[SPEAKING SPANISH] [WHALE VOCALIZING] {DAVID} In the waters of Puerto Ángel they have three species of whale.

The commonest one that they see is a humpback whale.

They are renowned for their singing.

[WHALE VOCALIZING] But here they have a very special population that they know.

And the Pacific humpback whales are different from the Atlantic.

They're monitoring their behavior.

They identify them by the different spots and shapes of their tails.

[WHALE VOCALIZING] The coast of Puerto Ángel is one of the best places to view dolphins.

The ocean current here meet, and it makes an ideal place.

Good nutrients, plenty of fish.

But they have two very large schools of dolphins.

One, that lives right near the coast and they love to play.

There's, they've seen more than a thousand of them in one group.

They love to jump up in the air.

Why did they jump?

Perhaps, Oh, just the sheer heck of it.

Or perhaps to help them get rid of parasites on their skin, or both.

But they have no fear whatsoever of the boats.

And so the people, they have an industry almost here in Puerto Ángel of boats going out to see the dolphins and, they hope, the whales.

But the dolphins are a very special group.

They actually live and breed right in this area.

They don't move.

Other dolphins are migratory.

[WATER SLUSHING] [UPBEAT MUSIC] They have three species of turtles here.

[WAVES CRASHING] The commonest ones are the Green Sea Turtle and we were lucky enough to come upon a pair of sea turtles mating.

And they are in no hurry to stop.

And there's legendry here and perhaps based upon scientific fact, their mating can last up to 14 hours.

But here we are, lucky enough to see, a rather casual courtship consummation by the famed Green Sea Turtles One of the very interesting things that the researchers have discovered is that during the Covid Epidemic, when the fishermen could not come out to fish because the disease, the fish stocks rapidly were replenished and fish that were almost gone returned in abundance.

It's a real interesting sign, proven sign now that the human activity deeply affects the population of fish and resources which both the mammals and human beings have.

[WATER SLUSHING] [BOSSA NOVA MUSIC] [MUSIC FADES] [BIRDS SINGING] We're in an estuary called La Ventania in the coast of Oaxaca.

It's a sweetwater swampy place.

But it has a long history of being home to a lot of crocodiles.

And it was really a long struggle to protect this because, many developers look at these kinds of places as being ideal to put housing developments.

But it was through the efforts of one man who galvanized a community to improve their economic situation, that it was set up.

And so today we have this fabulous, quiet, full bird sanctuary with the quiet waters that go for five kilometers.

[BIRDS SINGING] [SPEAKING SPANISH] {TRANSLATION} {AGUSTIN} Previously, this was very much a crocodile habitat.

We're talking 1940 to 1960, but there was a shortage of crocodiles.

Then they found the skin of an Olive Ridley Turtle.

So they started working on those turtles, which became extinct by 1980.

[SPEAKING SPANISH] [BIRDS SINGING] [SPEAKING SPANISH] By 1990, the government imposed a ban which applied to the turtle, crocodile, the mangroves, the iguanas and the palm trees in the area [SPEAKING SPANISH] {DAVID} Then it was finally set aside as a protected area and a federally recognized protected area with the idea of reestablishing the population of crocodiles in here plus other animals.

This is, a place in a mangrove swamp.

It's really the fountain of life for the oceans.

And to have this preserved is a benefit to all of Mexico and all the oceans of the world.

{AGUSTIN} [SPEAKING SPANISH] {TRANSLATION} This, a lagoon ecosystem, where the flora and fauna is both marine and wild.

This entire area, as we can see, is a refuge for larvae because it connects to the sea every year.

A huge quantity of fish larvae enters when the sea comes in and in six months they breed, and then they return to sea.

[SPEAKING SPANISH] When they're done growing the fishermen catch them and sell that product out there.

Fishing in the sea, not here, since the fish are in here protecting themselves anymore.

So here the flora and fauna is wild.

[SPEAKING SPANISH] Here we have raccoons, badgers, armadillos, reptiles such as iguanas, vipers and a variety of birds.

[BIRDS VOCALIZING] [SPEAKING SPANISH] And when there are a lot of the larvae that regulates a population of birds, and the birds regulate the population of the crocodiles, regulating the cycle of the food chain.

It's a mechanism within the ecosystem that is very valuable.

We dont plunder, we don't destroy.

We fish only for consumption, not for commercial trade.

[SPEAKING SPANISH] [BIRDS SINGING] {DAVID} This is the closest I've ever been to a crocodile.

It's well known here.

They call it the Loma Verde, or greenback It looks malevolent to me, but apparently it's doing its regular habit of going around trying to find anything to eat, mainly fish, but they can move very fast.

They can run so fast they can almost outrun me, which is seen quite a bit, of course, but they are a formidable beast, millions and millions of years old.

And here we see one.

It looks like something out of the Jurassic Park.

[ACOUSTIC GUITAR MUSIC] [BIRDS VOCALIZING] [SPEAKING SPANISH] {TRANSLATION} {AGUSTIN} There are 27 families working right here in the lagoon, and even those who don't, their cabins, restaurants and everything they sell is considered part of this community project.

Because in this community we don't have outsiders.

[SPEAKING SPANISH] More than anything, the local people who are working here and selling their product are the most important, because if we sell the land, investors will come and build big hotels and restaurants.

Then we would have much stronger competition.

[BIRDS SINGING] [SPEAKING SPANISH] {DAVID} Nowhere is the wealth of water from the mountains more evident than at the series of waterfalls an hour's drive inland.

[MEXICAN GUITAR PLAYING] The Pacific coast of southern Mexico, especially in the state of Oaxaca is very mountainous.

It's the result of a huge conflict between tectonic plates that are colliding with each other or pulling away.

The result is a rapid rise from the ocean of mountains that go up from sea level to almost 12,000ft.

In the summertime, warm air masses come up from the tropics, and when they meet that southern coast, they sometimes create hurricanes.

But almost always they bring a lot of moisture.

And as that moisture rises it condenses and creates greener and greener forests.

Those forests are extremely important as watersheds.

The heavy rains would probably, in a desert area, erode huge amounts of soil.

But in the mountains the great leaves of the forest intercept the drops of water as they fall from the sky, taking away their power to erode.

They release them slowly to the ground and it seeps in as a result of greater rainfall and more gentle absorption, streams originate here.

Some of these, because of the power of the leaves and the greater precipitation, release their water slowly to form rivers, some of them great rivers, and because they are falling so quickly, they produce waterfalls and rapids and the water supply for all of the coast.

[GENTLE MUSIC] When we see large pools of sky blue water, we look up above to see if there are dams or waterfalls that are pretty flat across.

We see those.

That's called travertine.

If we see travertine we know that water has come from limestone.

It has passed through limestone.

Above us here in the southern Sierra Madre, there are 1000 to 2000 cliffs of pure limestone that once laid in the bottom of the ocean.

And now it's here.

It purifies the water, adds a little calcium to it, and gives it this beautiful color that makes it irresistible for swimming and provides a magnificent source of beautiful water for the cities below.

[WATER SPLASHING] [GENTLE ACOUSTIC GUITAR] [MUSIC FADES] The state of Oaxaca is generally recognized to be the most culturally and biologically diverse state in all of Mexico.

16 different indigenous language groups, perhaps as many as 30 different diverse habitats, and many of those are found on the southern slopes of the great Sierra Madre of the south, which drains into the Pacific Ocean.

And as it drains into the Pacific Ocean, it gathers water and those waters gather nutrients and the nutrients then combine through those miles and miles of turbid, fast flowing, beautiful green waters empty into the ocean, and with them they bring life.

They bring food for many, many other critters, which makes the ocean around Oaxaca the most diverse in all Mexico.

[WAVES CRASHING] Join us next time In the Americas with me, David Yetman The Cascades split states in our northwest from north to south.

In Washington, the divide is noticeable on the west are the Pacific Ocean and lush forests on the east lie semi-arid hills and farmlands where irrigation is necessary.

The mountains are volcanic, some of them active.

People have founded communities with distinct personalities on both sides of the range.

[UPBEAT MUSIC] {ANNOUNCER} Funding for In the Americas with David Yetman was provided by Robert and Carol Dorsey.

The Guilford Fund.

Arch and Laura Brown.

And Hugh and Joyce Bell.