`Due to our awareness campaign, we have reduced the slaughtering over the years. The battle is not won by any stretch of the imagination and I’m sure we have lots of challenges ahead of us, but we have proven to be successful.’ Ms Arjoon
By Esther Elijah
CONSERVATIONISTS in Guyana are reporting a decline in sea turtle mortality figures after switching their game plan from mostly heavy monitoring and patrolling at nesting beaches to more sustainable alternative plans that aid and educate the native communities that massacre these giant sea dwellers for a source of food.

Leatherbacks and Green Turtles, two of four species common here during the March-August nesting season, are repeating the trend of 2002 currently flocking at Luri Beach, one of the 12 offshoots of the wider Shell Beach district that annually attracts these endangered turtles. Figures collected as of May 8, 2003, put the figure of nesting Leatherbacks and Green Turtles at 200.

“When I was up at Shell Beach this week there were 14 sea turtles coming ashore to nest every night,” says Annette Arjoon, Project Coordinator of the Guyana Marine Turtle Conservation Society (GMTCS).

“This has been a very good year and we’ve noticed that a lot of the sea turtles that were injected with a microchip in their necks and tagged in 2000 are returning,” she told the Sunday Chronicle a few hours after arriving in Georgetown with the latest data and burden of proof that the GMTCS’ latest community-driven venture has borne its greatest fruit.

Officers from the GMTCS have tagged 63 new sea turtles, mostly Leatherbacks, as of May 8.

“The Leatherbacks have survived slaughtering from the 1960s to date and are on the increase, unlike hard-shelled species like the Green Turtles, whose numbers have been on the decline because they were being killed for their meat,” Arjoon reported.

“Now nesting in Guyana are more Leatherbacks, the biggest species in the world. The average size of Leatherbacks nesting here is 1 000 to 1 200 pounds,” she stated.

Arjoon said there has been a decrease in the poaching of sea turtle eggs along the beaches in the Shell district traversed by GMTCS wardens.

In 2000, the sea turtles nested at Kamwatta but have been known to spread across different beaches along Shell district that have not been damaged by erosion.

There are at least 300 species of turtles in the world, of which eight are Marine, 40 live on land (i.e. `tortoises), and the remainder inhabit freshwater. All sea turtles are known for being giant-sized (80-1 000 pounds at maturity), have forelimbs modified into paddle-like flippers with no distinct digits and one or two claws or none at all. The head of a sea turtle cannot be pulled into the shell for protection; therefore, the skull has a strong bony roof that is almost as strong as the shell.

Guyana is renowned for attracting four sea turtle species at nesting: Green Turtle, Leatherback, Hawksbill and Olive-Ridley. In all sea turtle species, the breeding females have to crawl ashore on to a beach, where they excavate a broad `body pit’ followed by a deep, narrow egg cavity, into which they deposit about a hundred, more or less, white, spherical, soft-shelled eggs. They usually nest more than once in a season, usually close to the same spot. The Green turtle and Leatherback may nest as much as eight or nine times, producing a bucketful of eggs, at least 120 each time. But these species take at least one, sometimes more, seasons `off’ between their nesting years.

In February 2000, the Ministry of Fisheries and GMTCS worked together and imposed a `No Fishing Zone’ along the marine turtles’ nesting beaches when it was reported that the numbers of sea turtle mortalities had exceeded tagged sea turtles for that month. Nine months later a Fisheries Awareness Project was formulated and funded by the United Nations Development Programme and the Environmental Protection Agency. The objective was to put into action public awareness programmes particularly focused at fishermen and coastal communities to enlist their support on sea turtle conservation measures in Guyana.

“Without the communities’ involvement, you cannot have long-term conservation success. If the communities have not bought into the conservation project at an early stage, people will go back to the destructive practices of killing turtles and their eggs,” Arjoon said.

“Having realised this (the GMTCS) decided to meet with communities - mainly those at Almond Beach, which is part of Shell Beach, and spoke with the 160 Amerindians belonging to the Warau, Arawak and Carib tribes. We asked them how we could help them support the conservation effort by not killing the turtles when they come on the beach to nest,” she added.

Arjoon said it is evident “people have a very romanticised vision of Amerindians wanting to paddle their canoes, hunting with their bow and arrows and living in the forest” but these natives have their basic “bread and butter” issues that need to be addressed.

One of the first requests made by the Amerindians was for GMTCS to find them a market for copra harvested from the thousands of coconut trees along Shell Beach. Residents in the past sold copra to the Pomeroon Oil Mill on the Essequibo Coast, but sales dwindled as more of their producers could scarcely afford to travel by boat from Shell Beach to the Coastal areas.

Arjoon said an alternative had to be found in the form of Robert Badal, Chief Executive Officer of Guyana Stockfeeds, who generously offered to purchase 10,000 pounds of copra plus give the Amerindians preferential treatment, which includes shipment every fortnight from Mabaruma, a neighbouring settlement, to Georgetown for processing.

The residents of those communities, using equipment donated by Guyana Stockfeeds, are now converting the coconut fibre, which they would have normally dumped as waste in the ocean, to produce basket liners and fibre dust used in gardening, according to Arjoon.

“The community of Shell Beach then went a step further and started producing coconut oil, which they sell at a neighbouring village - then they began making Crabwood Oil soap for their domestic use,” she stated.

To date, more alternative income projects at Shell Beach include the production of crafts such as wind chimes intricately designed using the shells and drift wood that wash up on beaches; mats, sculptures, cassava cassareep, traditional ornamental baskets woven from pieces of fishing nets collected from the ocean, embroidered artwork, and a chicken farm.

Similarly, the benefits to local livelihoods of production and use of non-timber forest products as part of the `basket of goods’ available from tropical forests is increasingly gaining recognition. For example, the production of Crabwood Oil in forest-dwelling communities similar in nature to Shell Beach, using the fruit of the Crabwood tree (Carapa guianensis) is an important non-timber forest product for Guyana endorsed by the Iwokrama International Centre for Rainforest Conservation and Development.

Apart from its widely known medicinal and cosmetic properties, Crabwood Oil is widely traded in Brazil, Europe and North America under the name `Andiroba Oil’ where it is also marketed as an excellent insect repellent effective against mosquitoes, sand flies, kaboura and bete rouge.

“As fast as the Crabwood soap and other products come to Georgetown, it is taken directly to the souvenir shop at the Guyana Zoo. The zoo makes the purchase, the (GMTCS) pays the natives, and the zoo then sets its own mark-up price and earns a profit from the sale of the items,” Arjoon said.

“The GMTCS has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the zoo and this is a positive example of how we can network and benefit from each other,” she noted.

These Shell Beach projects target mainly the members of the ABC Women’s group founded in 2001 by Amy Augustus, the village matriarch. The limited involvement from the men folk is due to the fact that handicraft production at Shell Beach is done during the women’s spare time when they are neither tending to their families nor farming. The immediate financial benefits of this sort of production are not as readily available or lucrative as fishing, the main income earner of Shell Beach residents.

“The whole aim of this community initiative is to allow the residents to earn an income to buy beef or chicken instead of taking the turtle eggs or chopping off the sea turtle flippers and using it for meat,” Arjoon stated.

This community project has thus far been dubbed “successful” although Shell Beach covers a stretch of 100 miles and GMTCS has warden presence only on five miles.

“There are some areas where we do not have a presence. People from those places would still do some amount of slaughtering,” Arjoon admitted, adding, “However, due to our awareness campaign we have reduced the slaughtering over the years. The battle is not won by any stretch of the imagination and I’m sure we have lots of challenges ahead of us, but we have proven to be successful.”

World sea turtle expert, Dr. Peter Pritchard, whose research activities in the Shell Beach nesting area dates back to the late 1960s, is the brainchild of the GMTCS.

The GMTCS was formed in April 2000 with the Prime Minister of Guyana, Samuel Hinds, graciously agreeing to become its patron. Initially, the programmes were largely centred on monitoring and patrolling. Eight Amerindian wardens, each settling along the beaches of the North West, are still employed annually during the sea turtle nesting season - March-August - when watchful eyes are needed to prevent slaughtering and to pick up eggs either doomed by erosion or poachers. Prior to registering the GMTCS, conservation efforts by Dr. Pritchard and his Amerindian assistant Audley James had begun in the late 1980s. This involved tagging the turtles using Monel tags that were supplied by the Gainsville Marine Turtle Monitoring Centre.

With the cooperation of the government, the British High Commission, Non-