Providing Safekeeping For Southeast Asia's Vanishing Turtles

National Wildlife, Oct-Nov, 2000 by Ted Williams

Softshells and common snappers are severely depleted in parts of the Midwest. In a recent study at Reelfoot Lake in northwest Tennessee, researchers from the Tennessee Aquarium marked 4,000 turtles that are being harvested legally for the Chinese market-red-eared sliders, softshells, river cooters, painteds, maps and common snappers. At each study site and for each species, population models showed sharp decreases. Here, and all over the world, turtles are being removed from the wild faster than they can repopulate. One broker in Vietnam reports shipping about 3,000 pounds of North American turtles to China each week.

Bonner believes the future of Southeast Asia's turtles is in the hands of private turtle conservationists willing to acquire food-market refugees by whatever means possible (most likely from American pet- industry buyers who visit China), restore them to health at facilities like hers, then breed them. Just such a turtle conservationist in Wisconsin had shipped her the 14 sick Forsten's tortoises. In the two months that followed, she managed to save nine. "If you get a core of 50 people like that and each takes a group of a species, maybe you can create a hope," says Bonner.

Currently, she is working with 15 Southeast Asian species. She will do more if she can get funding to hire her five volunteers as full-time employees and to construct a building which, because Southeast Asian turtles are tropical, would operate like a solar greenhouse. "These species are simply not going to exist in their native countries," she declares. "You don't change the mind-set of a culture that has eaten turtles for 2,000 years."

If the nations of Southeast Asia ever decide to protect turtles, efforts like Bonner's will at least provide a reservoir of captive stock for reintroduction. But not all turtle conservationists agree that persuading the Chinese to desist from eating turtles is hopeless or even that Bonner's plan can work. However, says herpetologist James Harding of the Michigan State University Museum, a turtle advisor to the IUCN-World Conservation Union: "I've always argued against depending on breeding programs to maintain turtle populations, mainly because adults are taken from the wild. But if you go into food markets and pull out a few specimens for breeding programs, you're not doing any harm at all; the situation in Southeast Asia is so desperate that I'm attracted to the idea."

Harding agrees with Bonner that captive breeding in the United States has to be a coordinated effort, however. "If we have hobbyists breeding these turtles but nobody's keeping track of sources and lineages, then I think it's all going to devolve into chaos," he says.

"Establishing captive populations of Southeast Asian turtles is a desperate move fraught with problems," comments Bonner's colleague, Gretchen Kaufman, an assistant professor of wildlife medicine at Tufts University. "It's going to be extraordinarily difficult, and Bonner can't possibly do it alone. But that's how solutions to wildlife crises begin. You get an amazing, tireless person pushing, and all of a sudden a movement starts."