Sea Turtles Get Armed Escorts/Bloomberg News

Bloomberg News

By Patrick Harrington

Sept. 15 (Bloomberg) -- One of Antonio Diaz's favorite meals
isn't on the menu at any restaurant in his hometown of Acapulco,
Mexico: sea turtle meat.
``It has lots of vitamins,'' said Diaz, 42.
Fifteen years after the country banned killing turtles,
Mexicans such as Diaz keep eating them because of the perception
they enhance male virility.
In the past five years, Mexico has doubled the number of
police and troops working to save turtles in an effort to protect
the animals and their eggs better on the nation's beaches. This
month, as the egg-laying season reaches its height, conservation
groups are intensifying efforts to save the turtles.
``The consumption of eggs is increasing,'' said Aida Navarro,
30, conservation manager for Wildcoast, a San Diego, California-
based environmental protection organization. ``If sea turtles
aren't allowed to reproduce, there is no way they can recover.''
About 150 inspectors, accompanied by about 1,000 Navy troops
patrol the 28 most important of 200 beaches where sea turtles nest
during the height of the egg-laying season, said Luis Fueyo
MacDonald, 51, Mexico's senior environmental law-enforcement
official for marine life in Mexico City.

Beach Guards

Agripino Cortes Moreno, who commands the 14 environmental
officers working with Monica Vallarino, who runs the nearby
Hermosa Beach Turtle Camp, said it's impossible to protect
Mexico's more than 9,000 kilometers (5,421 miles) of coastline.
``You can see the problem,'' he said, pointing along the
beach that stretches into the distance. ``We can't patrol most of
it.''
The focus of government anti-poaching efforts has changed
since 2000. Before, more emphasis was placed on attempting to
prevent their sale in markets and alongside highways.
On a beach just south of Acapulco, Vallarino accompanies a
group of environmental police armed with assault rifles. A call on
her cell-phone alerts her to the arrival of nesting Olive Ridley
turtles about a kilometer (1,094 yards) away.
Vallarino and police race along the beach to where the
turtles have emerged from the sea. An officer or volunteer stands
guard by each turtle while she lays as many as 100 golf ball-sized
eggs and then escorts her as she drags herself back to the ocean.
``Poachers are everywhere in this area,'' said Vallarino, 40.
``Without a guard they will take them away.''
Volunteers carry the eggs to the Hermosa Beach camp, where
they take about 50 days to incubate. The hatchlings are then
released into the ocean.

Poachers

To avoid patrols, some poachers catch female turtles at sea,
slice them open to remove their eggs and then dump the bodies into
the ocean. On a single day last month, 80 such carcasses washed up
on a beach in the southern state of Oaxaca.
In a country where the minimum wage is just more than 45
pesos a day, the incentive is clear. An egg sells for as much as
60 pesos on the black market, meaning a single nest can yield
6,000 pesos.
Juan Carlos Cantu, director of Defenders of Wildlife's
Mexican branch, said poverty alone doesn't explain the egg trade.
In coastal areas, people sometimes collect eggs to buy alcohol and
clothes.
``We've found that egg stealing increases on weekends and
before festivals -- it isn't a question of needing resources to
survive,'' Cantu said.

Endangered Species

All five species of marine turtle that inhabit Mexico's
waters are listed as endangered by the World Conservation Union,
based in Gland, Switzerland.
Three are considered ``critically endangered,'' meaning they
face an extremely high risk of extinction. The leatherback, which
can weigh as much as 500 kilograms (1,100 pounds) and measure up
to 1.8 meters (6 feet) in length, is the most threatened.
Until the 1980s, Mexico was the leatherbacks' most important
breeding ground, Cantu said. Since then, the number of females
nesting in Mexico each year has fallen to less than 10 from 880.
To help curb the illegal trade, groups such as Defenders,
Greenpeace and Wildcoast have begun campaigns to convince Mexican
men that eating turtle eggs does nothing for their virility.
One Defenders' poster shows a man with turtle egg dripping
from his mouth along with the caption: ``You drank the lie --
turtle eggs are not aphrodisiacs.'
Wildcoast's posters of sparsely clothed models above a
caption that reads, ``my man doesn't need turtle eggs'' provoked
objections from Mexico's National Women's Institute, which
complained that it was demeaning to women.
Wildcoast said the billboard is effective because it attracts
attention.
``In the end, we came up with the idea of using a good-
looking woman saying that, `if you are consuming sea turtle eggs
you are letting me know that you are not man enough,'' Navarro
said.
The campaigns have done little to persuade Diaz to drop the
habits of a lifetime. Turtle eggs make men more potent, and he
recently ate some, courtesy of his brother-in-law who works near
the beach, Diaz said.
``Thirty years, ago my grandmother took me to the market to
drink turtle blood,'' Diaz said. ``It's just like any other kind
of seafood.''

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