Source : ABS-CBN, Philippines, 29 Jan '05
By : Manuel Cayon
  

Councilor Leonardo Avila III, head of the local conservation group for sea turtles, said that the member-countries monitoring and protecting the sea turtle within the Indian Ocean region, have shared notes about the life cycle of the turtle and marking the period of the early turtle’s life as the “lost years.”

“From only a few months from being hatched, where the turtles are known to begin to take to the sea to the next several years of foraging in the deep sea, we don’t know where they are, what they really exactly do and what their habits and ways are at foraging in this part of the earth,” Avila said.

He said that many other regions have already formed associations and may have already kept track of the early years of the turtle to the threshold of laying eggs, or a period of as early as 25 years to as long as 50 years. But in the Indian Ocean region, the monitoring has not yet provide substantial data at where the turtles were and how they live, forage and survive.

A satellite tract of turtles would indicate that they were highly migratory, reaching as far north as Japan from the Indian Ocean, to as far east as crossing the Pacific Ocean and to as far west as crossing the Atlantic Ocean.

“We only come to know them as adults, surpassing the age of even many humans monitoring them. They are known to live as long as 150 years,” he said. He added that the long surviving skill of turtles were traced to their ancestry dating as far back as the dinosaur age. “They come from that age, and survived many ages,” he said.

He said that the turtles were known to go back to where they were hatched, “that is, if their nesting sites have not been destroyed by urbanization.”

“They are known to have photographic memory of their nesting site, a memory embedded to them while they were young and before they go to the sea,” he said.

He said that the conservation groups in the Indian Ocean and Southeast Asia have been interested to know the lost years of the turtle, “of course, while there is still time to monitor them.”

Nineteen countries have joined the forum for the conservation and management of the sea turtles in the Indian Ocean and Southeast Asia (IOSEA), and signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) in 2001.

In its website, the IOSEA MOU said that “although marine turtles face many threats, illegal and unsustainable exploitation is a major concern in Southeast Asia.”

“Two recent reports from Traffic, the wildlife trade monitoring network, released on the eve of the recent second meeting of signatory states to the IOSEA MOU in March last year, revealed that the trade in bekko— products made from the shell of hawksbill turtles— along with other marine turtle products, continues unabated in major source countries, such as Indonesia and Vietnam,” it said.

Thailand was the recent signatory to the forum, leaving Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and Timor Leste as “among the 22 eligible States in the region that have yet to sign the MOU,” the IOSEA website said.The Philippines was listed in the forum through the Davao City-based Task Force Pawikan, although the task force was under the umbrella of the Philippine Pawikan Conservation Program of the Protected Areas Wildlife Bureau of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources. This made Davao City the key turtle conservation place in the Philippines.

The IOSEA agreement was under the auspices of the Convention on Migratory Species (CMS). The IOSEA effort was expect to be boosted by the holding of the 13th conference of the parties to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Flora and Fauna in Bangkok in October.

CITES has already listed all marine turtles as migratory species “affected by poaching and trade demand across their range, whether for meat, eggs or shell, and all international trade is banned under CITES regulations.”