Turtle Day Festival Brings Cultures Together by: Aimee Sanders, Outreach Program Manager |
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I'm still feeling sleepy, and the muscles in my legs are sore as I shuffle barefooted across the warm, damp sand on the shores of Mayumba National Park. It's almost two in the morning, and I'm nearing the end of my 15 kilometer patrol of Africa 's most important turtle nesting beach. With every step the sand under my feet squeaks like freshly fallen snow, and the twinkling of the phosphorescence that has washed over it at a higher tide makes me feel like I'm walking on a starry sky. Up ahead, I can see a dark mass on the sand. It could be another tree trunk washed up on the beach, or it could be Nyamu (the local name for leatherback turtle), who's just travelled thousands of kilometers to lumber up the steep beach, dig her meter deep nest, and leave behind about 100 ping-pong ball sized eggs. As I get closer, tracks in the sand (as if a small bulldozer had just passed through) reveal that the dark figure is indeed a 600 kilogram leatherback. So my patrol partner Wens and I get our tools out to measure and identify this enormous turtle. |
We approach her, trying to avoid the sand that she sends flying with her giant flippers, but some still gets in my hair as I measure her head and carapace. Wens waits until she begins laying her eggs and then clips a metal identification tag on each of her hind flippers. Her breathing sounds like the waves crashing on the shore just below us: whoooooosh… shoooooooooosh… whooooooooooosh. As she labors she seems ancient and wise; her species has existed for over 110 million years, so it's no wonder that some cultures believe that the world came into being on the back of a sea turtle. Although she appears tranquil, her nesting experience is far from being a moment of inner peace. She weighs almost as much as a VW bug, and is extremely maladapted to manoeuvring on land. Due to the exertion of dragging her great mass across the sand, her body temperature is skyrocketing. As a cooling mechanism, blood pumps to the surface of her skin, giving her head and neck a rosy hue. This evolutionarily hardwired behavior is probably one of the most stressful activities in her life. Some 20 minutes later, she covers her nest with sand, makes a wide turn, and arduously descends toward the luminous foam of the breaking waves. As she slides back into the inky darkness of the night sea, where she's once again as graceful as a bird in flight, I can hardly suppress a shout of joy. The obstacles she's survived to make it this far are daunting. Less than one percent of leatherback turtles survive to successfully reproduce. Out of those hundred eggs she's just left behind to incubate and hatch, which one will make it as far as she has? As host to one of the most important leatherback nesting populations in the world, Gabon has a special responsibility to help ensure the survival of the species. Educating Gabonese students in the rich natural heritage of their country is an important part of this task. I work with nearly 1500 students, teaching them everything from basic concepts like: “What is the environment?” to the idea of species interdependence. But, come January, we talk about, sing about, play games about, and are generally obsessed with marine turtles. By the end of the peak of the nesting season, these kids will know that Mayumba's beaches attract the highest density of nesting leatherback turtles in Africa, and that they have a key role to play in ensuring that it stays that way. In the last 20 years, Pacific leatherback turtles have sustained a 90% reduction in numbers. If we do not begin to take an active role in marine turtle conservation, leatherback turtles in the Atlantic risk a similar fate, pushing the species ever closer to extinction. In addition to natural threats such as crabs, monitor lizards, and mongoose that pillage their nests, erosion that destroys nesting habitats, and sharks that eat both juvenile and adult turtles, the leatherback turtle faces grave dangers from human activities. |
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In Gabon , industrial trawlers (commercial fishing boats that illegally strip marine life from restricted coastal waters) are likely the cause of many turtle deaths. Worldwide, thousands of marine turtles drown each year when caught underwater in nets. Another threat from industrial fishing is the presence of long-line tuna fishing boats sent from other nations including Spain and Portugal to fishing grounds off the coast of Central Africa . These vessels use many thousands of baited hooks over tens of kilometers; a fishing method that is notoriously non-selective. “Bycatch”, a term used to refer to creatures incidentally caught by fishing boats (later thrown overboard as waste) can include large numbers of sharks, seabirds, and sea turtles. Without monitoring by fisheries agents, the level of bycatch cannot be accurately assessed or controlled. Dead turtles that wash up on the coast indicate only a fraction of the damages caused by these menaces. New hook designs are now available that promise to greatly reduce by-catch, and we hope the European Union will move towards insisting on the use of these on all vessels fishing with long-lines. Offshore oil exploitation also poses a threat to sea turtles. Spills at sea can potentially poison turtles and other marine life, and residues washing up on the coast poison the beach environment and act as a toxic and physical barrier to nesting females and hatchlings. Oil spills can travel a long distance on coastal currents, and the large number of wells in Congo and Angola pose a considerable threat to the nesting beaches of Mayumba. Spills from neighboring nations can also be harder to investigate and prevent in the future.
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| This spill came up from the south to land on Mayumba's best nesting beach in August 2004. An event like this in nesting season would be catatrophic. | |
| Garbage that has been left on the beach or in riverside villages will often be blown or carried by currents out to sea. Plastic bags are particularly dangerous for leatherback turtles, as their primary food source is jellyfish. A floating plastic bag strongly resembles and even moves like a jellyfish, so turtles can easily make a deadly mistake. Ingesting a plastic bag can kill them directly due to suffocation, or indirectly by blocking their digestive tract, lowering their resistance to pathogens and their ability to function in the face of other threats. |  |
In addition to these “unintentional” threats to turtles, there are the intentional threats of hunting turtles for their meat or eggs. For many centuries, humans and turtles coexisted without major impact on turtle populations, as most hunting and egg collection was for local consumption. However, modern commercialization of the sale of turtle meat and eggs can greatly reduce or even extinguish local (and potentially global) turtle populations. Like other marine turtle species, leatherback turtles are sometimes killed for their meat while on the beach nesting. Their eggs are also quite highly prized as food. In Mayumba, villagers who live around the lagoon located just outside the park hunt turtles and collect turtle eggs for both local consumption and commercial sale. To find the eggs, they probe the area of the turtle's nest with a pointed stick until it comes out of the sand sticky, having punctured an egg. Then they dig out the hole and take all of the eggs into their sacks to be eaten fresh or smoked by either local or out-of-town consumers. Turtle hunting and egg collection are prohibited in the National Park, and while teams of park rangers are educating turtle poachers on the beach, I am working to educate local schoolchildren about how and why we should protect Mayumba's marine turtles. As I teach these kids the responsible use of natural resources, my hope is twofold: that they will share what they've learned with their families, and that as they grow up and gain greater decision-making power, they will care about what happens to their environment. I use fun environmental education activities to try to show them that there are advantages to protecting their natural heritage. Last year during Turtle Month, I asked each class in Mayumba to compose a song summarizing the information they'd learned about turtles. One song in particular stood out, with a great syncopated rhythm and a funky little dance to go along with it. Soon the whole school (and maybe even the whole town?) knew the song; there'd be days when I'd walk down the street and every kid that I walked past would perform the turtle song and dance. In English, it would go something like this… |
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One should never kill marine turtles. Avoid polluting the sea. We must let turtles live happily. STOP! We're gonna dance… Turtle! Swing it, swing it yeah! Nyamu! Swing it, swing it yeah! Mayumba! Swing it, swing it yeah! (and they dance like turtles swimming)
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| This year, with considerable support from the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and Mayumba National Park , I organized a Turtle Day festival with one of the local schools. I'd learned that a documentary film team from Northern Ireland (Professor Brian Black, a filmmaker, and Dr. Karl Partridge , a biologist who founded Irish conservation organization The Sea Turtle Trust) were in the area filming leatherbacks with Guy-Philippe Sounguet of Aventures Sans Frontières (ASF, an entirely Gabonese NGO dedicated to the protection of sea turtles). As their visit coincided with Turtle Day, I decided to invite them to the festivities. |
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After opening our celebration with a performance of the turtle dance, we played a Chutes n' Ladders style game about turtles, the game board drawn in the shape of a turtle, each scale of the turtle shell holding a challenge for the teams' turtle to face. I'd brought props, including a life-sized cardboard leatherback carapace and front flippers that one lucky kid got to wear so the students could act out the situations in the game. When the turtle in the game was caught in a net, the kids acted it out, trapping our “turtle” in a big green fishing net and then waiting to see if the next roll of the dice would set him free or bring him back to the house to be dinner. (Happily, he was liberated.) A few turns after that, I helped a plastic bag “float through the water” so that our turtle could pretend to eat it. “Throw your trash in the garbage can!” yelled the kids. |
| Growing up in a Western culture, we are exposed to countless examples of animal anthropomorphism- cartoons on television, school mascots, family pets, Sesame Street, teddy bears, Mr. Ed (!), just to name a few. Personifying animals helps us to see them as creatures with a right to exist and thrive. Here in Mayumba, animals are usually seen as either a food source, a menace, or a nuisance. I'm trying to introduce the children to a new perspective on animals. Next week we're taking the Turtle Day poster contest winners on a field trip to the National Park so these kids can see, probably for the first time in their lives, a real leatherback turtle make her nest. Maybe they'll feel the same magic I felt the first time I knelt beside one on the starry sands of Mayumba. As Karl said to me: “You never forget the first time you're face to face with a sea turtle.” Activities like these give marine turtles a personality, helping children to feel compassion for them, and to reflect on how their own actions can aid or harm the turtles' chances of surviving. |
| Later in the game, a girl demonstrated how one should behave when on the beach with a turtle: waiting until the turtle had started to lay before taking photographs, so as not to disturb the turtle's nesting efforts with the bright light of the flash. Taking pictures of turtles instead of taking their eggs is a new idea in Mayumba, but one that may have a future. Globally, marine turtle tourism brings in almost three times as much money as the sale of turtle products such as meat and eggs, according to economic study " Money talks: Economic Aspects of Marine Turtle Use and Conservation" by conservation organization WWF. |  |
| Ecotourism in Mayumba is a promising prospect. Being home to the highest density of leatherback turtle nests in Africa (and the second highest in the world) is just the beginning. From June to September, about ten percent of the world's humpback whales pass just offshore on their yearly migration from Antarctic waters, making private whale watching tours an attractive dry season activity. Humpback and common dolphins play just beyond the surf, sometimes just several meters away from the swimming children. Elephant, gorilla, chimpanzee, mandrill, buffalo, and sitatunga roam the savannah/forest mosaic and even venture onto the picture-postcard beaches. A ninety-kilometer-long lagoon invites idyllic days of sailing on its open expanses or kayaking through its mysterious winding mangrove swamps. |
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Persuading the local population that there is more to be earned from developing ecotourism than from extractive exploitation requires convincing them that the natural richness in their own backyard is something that others would travel thousands of miles to see. Currently some 175,000 people take sea turtle tours annually to more than 90 sites in more than 40 countries (WWF). Already, due to visits from people like Karl and Brian, locals are seeing evidence of the international interest in Mayumba's turtles. During the Turtle Day festival, I introduced our guests and asked the kids if they knew where Ireland was. Some of them had heard of it, but not one knew where to find it on the map. After a student showed everyone where Gabon was, I pointed out Ireland , and everyone gasped. “It's so far away!” I heard several children murmur to their schoolmates. Karl played a couple short reels and jigs on his Irish tin whistles with Brian accompanying him on a Bodhran drum. The children listened, then started to clap in time, mesmerised by the music that had crossed borders and cultures. |
Near the end of our Turtle Day game, the kids took turns pretending to be poachers collecting turtle eggs on the beach. One child acted out the search for eggs while another took on the role of a park ranger, telling him why he should stop. After this skit, the teacher asked the audience if they would still eat turtle eggs, to which the kids replied loudly: “NO!” It's only a small step, but despite the enormous odds against Nyamu, I'm optimistic. |
