The Asian turtle crisis is not about Ninja Turtles. If it were, the turtles might stand a fighting chance. Turtles in China and Southeast Asia are being harvested in staggering numbers, to the point of extinction, scientists said Friday at a three-day international conference on saving Asian turtles hosted by the Fort Worth Zoo. Nearly every one of the 280 species of turtles -- from small, cute varieties that sit on logs and paddle in creeks, to the old, lumbering tortoises that creep across the desert sands -- is being collected and sold for food or medicine or as a pet, the scientists said. It is the turtles in Asia that suffer the most. Of 90 Asian turtle species, 67 are threatened with extinction. The Asian slaughter is being driven by 1.2 billion people in China who prefer traditional food and medicine over fast food and antibiotics, said John Behler, curator of herpetology at the Bronx Zoo in New York. "Tens of tons of live turtles are shipped daily to the major markets of China," Behler said. "Turtles were used historically in relatively small numbers. Now, it has become a focused, thorough harvest. They are becoming functionally extinct, unable to breed effectively." With China's natural resources dwindling and trade opportunities growing after 1990, turtles have been "vacuumed" off the lands of China's neighbors, especially in Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia, Behler said. A collection network has been established and there are smuggling routes through Burma, he said. "The problem is a cultural one that will not go away quickly. We believe the Chinese will continue to use turtles until they go extinct," said Dr. Anders Rhodin, director of the Massachussetts-based Chelonian Research Foundation, a nonprofit group dedicated to worldwide turtle research and conservation. A 6-inch golden coin turtle weighing about a pound can sell for up to $1,000, Rhodin said. It is believed that eating the ground-up turtle can cure cancer. Chinese athletes credited their Olympic success to eating turtle jelly, which is a paste made of turtles, and to drinking turtle blood concoctions, he said. Tucking head and limbs inside a shell is not an adequate turtle defense. "Wild turtle populations will be wiped off the face of the Earth in a couple of decades," Rhodin said. He encourages limiting the trade of wild animals while promoting the commercial production and farming of animals. U.S. turtles, some of them grown on farms, are legally shipped to China. | | Turtles in China and Southeast Asia are being harvested in staggering numbers, to the point of extinction. Few laws exist in the United States governing the import and export of nonendangered turtle species other than minimum size restrictions, said Bruce Weissgold, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service policy analyst. Red-eared slider turtles are extensively farmed and several million are exported annually, he said. "The turtle problem is a reliable sample of the disasters we're facing," said Ulie Seal, conference facilitator, who travels the world helping scientists organize their strategies for saving endangered species. In fact, some wildlife biologists and botanists estimate that two of every three kinds of plants and animals could disappear from the Earth within 100 years. Hundreds of species become extinct for every new one that emerges, a rate that approximates the rate 65 million years ago when dinosaurs disappeared, some scientists say. With the Earth's population expected to increase from 6 billion to 8 billion by 2025, as much as 60 percent of the biologically available energy will be used to maintain human life, Seal said. "There is a dramatic decline in living space for other biological systems," he said. Many conference participants said they favor establishing captive breeding programs to preserve species, without jeopardizing wild populations. The goal is not to eliminate the trade but to preserve the native turtle populations, they said. Even so, it may not be possible to reintroduce some turtle species in the wild, because many species are not able to "live in a degraded landscape," Seal said. |
