Today on Outside In, compromise. Here's reporter Will Huntsbury.

Long before Wallace J Nichols was a famous sea turtle researcher and long before he'd ever heard of the Baja Peninsula.

He was just like any other kid who loved nature. Well, kinda.

As a kid I had a particular affinity for turtles for catching them as a kid. We used to

catch them and paint numbers on their shells and you'd paint numbers on their shells with what?

Paint, we just put paint on their shells.

So you'd number them, you throw them back,

and then sometimes you'd recapture a turtle that had already been painted and that was pretty exciting.

His name is Wallace, but people call him Jay, and he grew up on the Chesapeake Bay.

The turtles were a mystery to him.

Where did they go when the hump of their shells disappear beneath the muddy water?

Once their eggs hatched, did the turtles ever see their parents again?

Jay's got an interesting theory about this strange attraction to turtles.

Well, I mean, without going too into it, I was adopted as a kid in turtle,

parental care and turtles is minimal.

They're literally left to the beach

and then left to the ocean.

They're adopted by sand and water.

So it may sound like we're about to get into some kind of young-y-in

psychology lesson here, but I promise I'm not going to do that to you. But I do need you to know how

much Jay loves turtles for this story to make sense, how much he identifies with them. Because in order to save them them he had to do some things that to

him anyway felt totally unthinkable. The fisherman said oh you want me to kill the

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