Souls of SOLS: Teal Guetschow

Each year, Teal Guetschow spends dozens of starry summer nights on Grand Riviere Beach in Trinidad and Tobago, surrounded by dozens of enormous leatherback sea turtles. That one kilometer beach is the largest nesting site in the world for the endangered leatherbacks, with up to 300 turtles laying eggs there every night during breeding season. 

But leatherbacks are declining by 5% each year due to threats like the loss of nesting sites or being accidentally caught in fishing nets. 

“Trinidad is like the last stronghold for leatherbacks,” Guetschow explains, “So my work is focused there because it’s such a globally important site for the turtles. And also, there’s a whole economy built around leatherbacks in Trinidad in terms of ecotourism. So it’s not just supporting the turtles, but also the people.” 

Guetschow studies threats to the leatherbacks at multiple stages in their lives, from nest to nets. On Grand Riviere, she studies whether the high number of sea turtle nests actually decreases the amount of hatchlings born due to factors like overheating from the crowding. As far as nets go, Guetschow also works with local fishermen across the country to see whether adding green LED lights to their fishing nets reduces the amount of adult sea turtles they catch.

Though Guetschow loves turtles now, she never specifically dreamed of working with them. 

Guetschow loved being outside since she was a little girl, when she accompanied her father on duck hunting trips through the Wisconsin woods, and relished summers at her parents’ lakeside cabin. Naturally, as an undergraduate, she thought she wanted to become a wildlife veterinarian––a dream she was so dedicated to that she moved into the windowless basement of a pet hospital to help monitor the overnight patients. 

“I had to sleep with a baby monitor because I had to wake up if an alarm or something was going off,” she recalls, “And I had to wake up every two hours to take the dogs out to use the bathroom. So I was exhausted all the time, and it really took a toll on my mental health.” 

After four months living in the basement, plus observing surgeries that made her queasy, Guetschow decided that the life of a veterinarian wasn’t for her. Instead, she pursued a career in wildlife conservation, recognizing that being outside and working with animals had been her real goal all along. That was only confirmed when, in her senior year of college, she spent a semester in Ecuador, which included visiting the Galápagos and studying marine science. 

“I remember very vividly the one lecture that really hooked me, for some reason, was we were sitting on the ground in a little gazebo on the coast of Ecuador. And the lecture was about fisheries and bycatch,” she recalls. 

After that experience, Guetschow got her master’s in environmental conservation at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Then, she got a job with an environmental consulting company called Envrionmental Incentives, which worked to implement USAID projects around the world. Guetschow worked to facilitate conversations between USAID and their oversees partners around marine conservation and sustainable fisheries, and monitored the projects’ progress as time went on. That job allowed her to travel and meet people all over the world, from Ecuador to the Philippines, South Africa to Belize. 

“I really liked that job,” Guetschow reflects, “But I knew I wanted to do my PhD. And when COVID hit, I couldn’t travel anymore. I felt removed from the actual conservation work. So I figured it was time.” 

Guetschow looked at doctoral programs around the world as she continued working. But after meeting Jess Senko at one of his talks, Senko invited her to do her PhD at ASU as part of his Marine Megafauna & Fisheries Conservation lab, where she could continue to work for Environmental Incentives while doing research with small-scale fishers for her dissertation.

When she started, Guetschow accompanied Senko to Trinidad and Tobago, where Senko had just begun connecting with small-scale fishers. On that trip, she visited Grand Riviere beach for the first time.

“It was my first time getting to actually see a leatherback, and wow––they’re actually massive. And there were twelve of them like, right next to me. I was like, ‘this is wild.’”

That day, the researchers had also talked with a community member who said they had observed that the beach didn’t actually produce that many hatchlings. 

“It was really that moment that launched my current project,” Guetschow reflects. “That’s what I really like about it: that my research is guided by this community member’s actual experience.”