For centuries, turtle eggs have been as good as currency on this tiny Indonesian island — they helped put children through school and kept the village kitty in petty cash.
But four years ago the people of Runduma, population 500, decided to change their way of life and start protecting the endangered animals, which return year after year to lay their eggs on the surrounding islands.
Now environmentalists say turtle numbers are increasing in the seas off southeast Sulawesi, and the turtle hunters have become their guardians in the battle to save the marine reptiles from extinction.
“We used to have a long and unique tradition of organizing the egg collection among the people here,” Runduma village chief La Brani said.
“Families took turns every night to collect eggs and 30 out of around 100 eggs from each nest were set aside for the village’s petty cash.”
Most of the eggs were taken from nearby Anano, an uninhabited tropical paradise that lies in ancient turtle nesting grounds between the Pacific and Indian oceans.
Money from the sale of the community eggs financed public spending on things like a new water filtration system, and helped poorer families cover expenses such as school fees for their children.
“It was terribly difficult at the beginning to convince people not to collect eggs as it was a living for them,” the village chief said.
FUTURE GENERATIONS
But the loss of this traditional source of income has not worried residents like Hatipa, 42, who would receive about US$0.09 per egg — enough to put her two children through school.
“I stopped collecting eggs in 2005 because I was afraid that if it continued, future generations would never know what a turtle looked like,” she said.
“Since then I’ve been struggling to protect the turtles. If people are gathering for a chat I tell them how we have to live side by side with the turtles.”
Under a 2005 agreement with the local administration and environmental groups, the islanders pledged to stop their trade in eggs and turtle meat and instead protect the endangered creatures.
In exchange the government has topped up the remote community’s public coffers, sent teachers and organized visits from celebrities including pop singers and beauty queens.
“Nobody came here before but now we have celebrity visits. Turtles have given us their blessings,” Hatipa said.
To supplement the poor fishing village’s income, donors can “adopt” a baby turtle or nest for up to US$96.
Purwanto, the coordinator of a turtle conservation program run jointly by the Nature Conservancy and WWF, said the adoptions helped educate local people about their marine environment as well as raise money.
“We occasionally keep one to five baby turtles from a nest ... and allow visitors to release them into the sea as a symbolic act to save the endangered species. We hope to raise awareness this way,” he said.
A short boat ride away on Anano, the evidence of rising turtle numbers is clear. Hour-glass shaped nests full of egg shells are scattered along the pristine beach, each one marking a new generation of turtles safely dispatched into the sea.
“During the peak season from September to December, up to seven turtles will lay their eggs here every night,” Purwanto said.
Some 243 turtles laid an estimated 3,000 eggs on the island last year, compared to just 20 in 2006 and 77 in 2007, he said.
Endangered green and hawksbill turtles are the most common visitors. The WWF estimates that 203,000 breeding green turtle females exist in the wild, and only 8,000 of the more critically endangered hawksbills.
FROM POACHING TO ECOTOURISM
All seven marine turtle species are experiencing severe threats to their survival, especially from pollution and the destruction of habitats such as coral reefs, beds of seagrass, nesting beaches and mangrove forests.
Those hatchlings that survive the exhausting dash from their nests to the sea face the ever-increasing risk of drowning in fishing gear or waste such as plastic bags as they make their epic migrations to feeding grounds.
Anano is a success story but elsewhere in the vast Indonesian archipelago turtles are being killed and exploited with impunity, conservationists said.
Laws setting out fines of up to US$10,000 and jail terms of five years for anyone caught stealing eggs or poaching live turtles are rarely enforced.
“Egg collection occurs in many parts of Indonesia, especially on Borneo and the western part of Sumatra island where turtle eggs are still commercialized,” said WWF’s national coordinator of marine species conservation Creusa Hitipeuw.
“Bali has been a main destination market of turtle meat which is illegally smuggled from the nearby islands of West Nusa Tenggara such as Lombok and Sumbawa.”
Located around 1,500km northeast of Jakarta, Anano and Runduma are among a cluster of islands in Wakatobi district on the southern tip of Sulawesi island.
They were declared a national park in 1996 and are among 11 zones the local government has set aside for marine and reef conservation.
“For the last three years we included environmental subjects in the school curriculum for elementary and junior high school,” said Wakatobi district chief Hugua, a former environmental activist.
“Wakatobi’s biggest development income will focus on ecotourism, which will maintain, among other things, the sustainability of sea turtle conservation.”
June 2 to June 8 Taiwan’s woodcutters believe that if they see even one speck of red in their cooked rice, no matter how small, an accident is going to happen. Peng Chin-tian (彭錦田) swears that this has proven to be true at every stop during his decades-long career in the logging industry. Along with mining, timber harvesting was once considered the most dangerous profession in Taiwan. Not only were mishaps common during all stages of processing, it was difficult to transport the injured to get medical treatment. Many died during the arduous journey. Peng recounts some of his accidents in
“Why does Taiwan identity decline?”a group of researchers lead by University of Nevada political scientist Austin Wang (王宏恩) asked in a recent paper. After all, it is not difficult to explain the rise in Taiwanese identity after the early 1990s. But no model predicted its decline during the 2016-2018 period, they say. After testing various alternative explanations, Wang et al argue that the fall-off in Taiwanese identity during that period is related to voter hedging based on the performance of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). Since the DPP is perceived as the guardian of Taiwan identity, when it performs well,
A short walk beneath the dense Amazon canopy, the forest abruptly opens up. Fallen logs are rotting, the trees grow sparser and the temperature rises in places sunlight hits the ground. This is what 24 years of severe drought looks like in the world’s largest rainforest. But this patch of degraded forest, about the size of a soccer field, is a scientific experiment. Launched in 2000 by Brazilian and British scientists, Esecaflor — short for “Forest Drought Study Project” in Portuguese — set out to simulate a future in which the changing climate could deplete the Amazon of rainfall. It is
Artifacts found at archeological sites in France and Spain along the Bay of Biscay shoreline show that humans have been crafting tools from whale bones since more than 20,000 years ago, illustrating anew the resourcefulness of prehistoric people. The tools, primarily hunting implements such as projectile points, were fashioned from the bones of at least five species of large whales, the researchers said. Bones from sperm whales were the most abundant, followed by fin whales, gray whales, right or bowhead whales — two species indistinguishable with the analytical method used in the study — and blue whales. With seafaring capabilities by humans
RSS