Man crowding out the leatherback turtle

After 150 million years swimming the waters of the South China Sea, time may be running out for the giant leatherback turtle, the government-sponsored Turtle Information Centre in Malaysia warns.

As recently as the 1980s, hundreds of leatherbacks - the largest turtle in the world, growing two metres long and weighing up to 500 kilograms - would lay eggs in the coarse yellow sand at Rantau Abang, 240 kilometres north-east of Kuala Lumpur. But last year only five female giants laboured onto the beach.

Efforts to save the turtles may have slowed their decline but have not stopped their swim toward extinction.

The Malaysian Fisheries Department set aside a 10-kilometre stretch of beach where the giants come ashore and lay between 50 and 150 ping-pong-ball-sized eggs at a time, mostly between May and September.

Fisheries staff have monitored their arrival for decades and transferred the eggs to hatcheries to protect them from natural predators like snakes, monitor lizards, crabs and birds, but mostly from people who eat the eggs as a delicacy and aphrodisiac.

A tourism industry grew up around the turtles with thousands of people visiting between May and August.

"Children used to ride on their backs on this beach," Mazlan Awang said, pointing out of his beach-side resort that was packed most nights in the 70s and 80s.

Some would even lay their eggs right by Awang's Beach Resort that Mazlan's father built in 1960, the year Mazlan was born.

The turtles made Rantau Abang a tourist destination, but the people stopped coming soon after the turtles stopped coming in large numbers.

"Ten years ago the turtles started to be fewer and fewer, and then the tourists started to be fewer and fewer," Mazlan said.

But some in this village of several hundred residents say it was the tourists that scared the turtles off to lay their eggs at other beaches.

Abdul, a 62-year-old man who grew up in Rantau Abang, shakes his head at the mention of the giant turtles. "It's a shame. There used to be so many of them, you could see them every night. But people did naughty things, like children rode on their backs. So they left for other beaches," he said standing outside his son's empty restaurant.

There is evidence that some have moved elsewhere, with a number of sightings a couple dozen kilometres south of Rantau Abang. And there is hope the turtles will move to other more secluded beaches, and sanctuaries are being discussed.

But the truth about most of them is probably worse, and that is they are dying off at the hands of man, and if the decline continues the new sanctuaries will be lonely places.

The tourists may have caused problems as they packed the beach, but they aren't what started killing the turtles in large numbers. Commercial fishing and pollution are more likely culprits, volunteer staff at the Turtle Centre said.

In 1998 the Fisheries Department predicted the leatherback would be extinct by 2003 unless the collection of eggs stopped. Their efforts have seen a sharp decline in the human consumption of those eggs, but pollution and fishing continue to kill the adult leatherbacks so their extinction remains probable. More than 99 percent are already dead.

"Plastic bags, which are mistaken for jellyfish, are eaten - only to choke them to death. Chemical waste and raw sewage poison them, leading to a slow, painful breakdown of their internal organs," one of the Turtle Centre displays states.

Visiting the little centre is like a trip to a tomb to another casualty of industrial development. Other turtles like the green, hawksbill and olive ridley continue to lay their eggs on scattered beaches around Malaysia. Although their numbers are decreasing, too, it's the leatherback that causes the biggest worry.

The other five locations worldwide where leatherbacks lay eggs have also seen declines.

Each female comes ashore every 20 years and digs a hole in the sand, lays and buries eggs then returns to the sea. The eggs hatch about 50 to 60 days later and the little turtles waddle their own way to the sea.

Fisheries staff now interrupt that process and transfer the eggs to protected areas, then take the young hatchlings back to where they were first laid so they can waddle to the sea.

Predators like barracuda and sharks hungrily await their arrival. In a natural environment the young turtles have a one in 5 000 to 10 000 chance of surviving to adults, staff at the Turtle Centre said.

But even at those harsh odds the turtles survived for millions of years. They shared the world with the dinosaurs and survived the ice age, but man may be crowding them out.

Source: www.iol.co.za