Turtle eggs in Punta Chame are offered for between 75 cents and $1 every.
The sea turtles of Punta Chame, a peninsula of Panama that juts into the Pacific Ocean, face an existential menace just like the rhino and pangolin: human superstition.
The eggs of the protected olive ridley turtle, illegally harvested from the seaside, are offered door to door on the town for 75 cents to $1 every for his or her purported aphrodisiac qualities.
“Especially males assume that by consuming turtle eggs they’ll have extra sexual pleasure,” stated Jorge Padilla, a conservationist with the NGO Fundacion Tortuguias which collects and hatches the valuable eggs.
“The eggs will not assist you to. They are usually not an aphrodisiac,” he insisted.
The olive ridley (Lepidochelys olivacea) is listed as “weak” on the Red List of the International Union for Conservation of Nature, with its numbers declining.
Its survival depends closely on individuals like Padilla, who with village volunteers gather freshly laid eggs and bury them in sand on the nursery.
Hundreds hatch right here every year between July and February. Within hours they’re dropped at the seaside and launched close to the water’s edge by volunteers who look on with parent-like pleasure because the tiny critters make a frantic sprint for the ocean.
“We can not simply put them (within the water) as a result of they should undergo a course of referred to as ‘imprinting’ (alongside the seaside) that can convey them again in 18-20 years to the identical seaside the place they have been born” to put their very own eggs.
The sea turtles of Punta Chame in Panama are a threatened species listed as ‘weak’ on the IUCN Red List.
The eggs of the protected olive ridley turtle are taken illegally and offered as an ‘aphrodisiac’
Turtles find yourself as bycatch in fisheries and face threats to their nesting seashores from human encroachment and local weather change.
Marine turtles and their unsure destiny are on the agenda of a worldwide wildlife summit going down in Panama City.
Used for combs, garments
Day and night time, Padilla patrols the seaside to scare off poachers.
Other threats embrace stray canine roaming the seashores for meals, and eagles.
Padilla repels the canine however leaves the eagles as they’re pure turtle predators and a part of the circle of life.
The turtles additionally find yourself as by-catch from fishing, and face threats to their nesting seashores from human encroachment and local weather change.
“There are many threats to sea turtles, each within the Pacific and within the Caribbean: unlawful egg harvesting, overconsumption of their meat, their shells… They are used for combs… clothes,” stated Padilla.
Marine turtles and their unsure destiny are on the agenda of a worldwide wildlife summit going down in Panama City, not removed from Punta Chame with its 500 human inhabitants.
The gathering of nations beneath the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) will take into account methods to fight egg theft and trafficking.
A working doc on the CITES web site states “the unlawful harvest and commerce continues to threaten marine turtles.”
© 2022 AFP
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Battle to save lots of Panama turtle at middle of aphrodisiac superstition (2022, November 17)
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