Global Turtle Diary Shows Worsening Outlook for Survival

Beneath the moonlight, as she slowly emerges from the sea, a loggerhead turtle cuts a mysterious figure on the foaming shoreline. On steamy summer nights from Virginia to Texas, thousands of these puzzling creatures are poking their scaly, barnacled shells out of the surf.

“It looks a little like an invasion of tiny army tanks,” says Larry Woods, curator of the Juno Beach Turtle Museum here. He is on the beach at 7 each morning to make sure the nocturnal turtle visits have gone smoothly.

Digging their flippers in the sand, the loggerheads inch their 300-pound bodies across the beach to deposit some 100 leathery eggs the size of Ping-Pong balls in three-foot sand pits--their gift to the future. It is the only reason a turtle comes out of the water.

But not all is well with the turtle, Woods is quick to point out. Sea turtles have rapidly become an endangered species. From the Caribbean to the Atlantic, and from the Mediterranean to the Pacific, whole populations of these giant reptiles are disappearing.

It is a story of accident and exploitation, a clash with people--and a phenomenally fast fall for a species as old as the dinosaur.

Sea turtles are most at risk during the summer, when they swim ashore to nest. They get tangled in fishing nets and become easy prey for hunters.

At one time, the world’s oceans were brimming with turtles. Centuries ago, ships’ logs said the Caribbean was so full of them one could be guided toward an island by the clacking of their shells knocking together.

Earlier this century, “you couldn’t row a boat in front of nesting beaches,” says Jim Richardson, a turtle expert at the University of Georgia. “Turtles would kick the oars out of the oarlocks.”

No one knows exactly how many sea turtles exist today because they are sea travelers. But on Mexico’s Rancho Nuevo beach, where 40,000 Kemp’s ridley turtles nested en masse on a single day in the 1940s, just 400 or 500 nest today. South Carolina’s barrier islands have registered an alarming 26% decline in loggerheads nesting just in this decade, says Sally Murphy, the state’s chief turtle biologist.

Georgia’s Cumberland Island National Seashore, nesting beach for 150 turtles 25 years ago, gets about 20 nesters a year now, Richardson says.

In Indonesia and Malaysia, hunters who once found their shores flush with quarry must head out to sea. In the Maldives and Cayman Islands, wild turtles have vanished.

Recent efforts in the United States to rescue the sea turtle have spawned perhaps the biggest wildlife debate since the 1978 brawl over the snail darter and Tennessee’s Tellico Dam.

The major turtle killer in U.S. waters is the net of shrimp fisherman, according to environmentalists. After years of pitched debate between them and the shrimp industry, Congress bought the environmental argument and ordered shrimpers to put “turtle excluder devices” in their trawling nets. Legislators say that could save 12,000 turtles a year.

The regulation took effect May 1. But after wide civil disobedience by shrimp fishers, it was scrapped, at least temporarily. Atlantic fishermen on the whole complied with the regulation, but thousands of fishermen in the Gulf of Mexico are fighting it tooth and nail.

Worldwide, the chief threat to the turtle is international trade. Sometimes legally, but often not, African, Asian, and Caribbean turtle hunters supply Asia’s huge appetite for turtle-shell jewelry and turtle leather accessories. The eating of turtle eggs and meat has helped deplete populations too.

“The sea turtle,” says Michael Weber of the Center for Marine Conservation, “is probably the most salable animal in the world. All its parts can be sold for meat, soup or shell.”

Japan is reportedly ending its stuffed-turtle trade, and there are some treaties and laws intended to help endangered animals. But so far, there has been little success enforcing the measures.

The Endangered Species Act, the prime U.S. animal protection tool, “is strong on paper,” says Michael Bean, chairman of the Environmental Defense Fund’s animal protection program. “The problems are with the willingness of the agencies responsible for implementing the legislation to use their authority effectively.”

Regulations were enforced in the Gulf only about two of the 11 weeks they were in effect. Commerce Department spokesmen say suspension of the rule leaves time to develop a program that is enforceable. Environmental groups are concerned that the suspension is a precedent and “punches a hole in the Endangered Species Act for all wildlife,” says Steve Moyer, a lobbyist for the National Wildlife Federation.

The chief international means for preserving turtles is the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, signed by 100 countries to limit trade in endangered plants and animals.

The record on compliance is not good. Indonesia, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Panama, Belize, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Honduras, Tanzania and Kenya are engaging in large-scale turtle selling.

Jeffrey Canin, a biologist with Greenpeace, and other ecologists are especially worried about Mexico and Indonesia, perhaps the world’s two most important turtle-nesting countries. Both have regulations governing wildlife but reportedly are sliding backward on actual protection.

Environmentalists acknowledge that it is difficult to tell Third World countries that they should restrict turtle hunting. Turtles are a cheap, local source of food; one animal can provide a poor family’s major source of income in a year. But ecologists insist that nations must learn to take fewer eggs and turtles today if they are to have any turtle supply in the future.

Seven turtle species still roam the seas. They range from the half-ton, jellyfish-eating leatherbacks, which explore earth’s colder oceans, to the 80-pound Kemp’s ridleys, which stick mostly to the warm Caribbean.