HUNTERS TURN CONSERVATORS
if harvesting continued. He said he was not thinking of himself when he decided to give up hunting turtles. “I am thinking about the future generations,” he says.
The island’s chief, Ratu Jone Cakautavatava, decided that Yadua’s residents should no longer consume turtles, and people began to wean themselves off what many considered a favourite food. “It was really hard to stop,’’ he says, “but I follow the law.’’
Cakautavatava describes the old days of hunting turtles in a fibreglass boat and spearing them through the shell. Gesturing to the harpoon in his hand, Cakautavatava says: “I keep the spear until the government says, ‘Yes, we can kill turtles’.”
Qarau’s commitment to replenishing the turtle stock involves monitoring them twice a week. He walks the beaches searching for turtle tracks, which could indicate a nest. He and others are trained to dig into nests and record their contents: hatched eggs versus duds.
Counting turtles is best done at night when turtles sleep under the coral, he said, or during the day when they feed at high tide on a shallow reef. A minute into a monitoring round on a recent morning, the shadowy shapes of six turtles jetted across a reef.
“You won’t see that sight anywhere else in Fiji,” says Laitia Tamata, a coastal fisheries officer for the World Wildlife Fund who manages the monitoring programme. When the programme began in Yadua in 2010, only six turtles nested on its beaches. Four years later there were 29 nests. At a monitoring site in Kavewa Island, no turtle nests were found in 2010; almost 70 were identified four years later.
Not every Fiji community shares Yadua’s commitment to conservation. Barry Hill, 27, a Yadua monitor, recently came across divers heading away from the island with two dead turtles in their boat. An argument turned into a brawl, he said.
“I tell them it is not allowed, but they can’t control themselves,” Hill says. “They want to eat turtles every day.”
Even though the ban was first imposed more than 20 years ago, it has been enforced only sporadically, and few, if any, violators have been fined or sent to prison, according to Kiji Vukikomoala, a lawyer at the Environmental Law Association.
“The general feeling is these are lowpriority cases because the penalties are so low,” Vukikomoala shares. Someone convicted of killing a turtle faces a maximum fine of about US$240 (RM1,031) and up to three months in jail.
The endorsement of a chief is often crucial to involving communities in conservation, says Michael Donoghue, an adviser on threatened and migratory species at the Secretariat of the Pacific Regional Environment Programme.
“If communities don’t want to do it, it doesn’t matter what the law says,” Donoghue stresses. “Especially in remote areas, it is unlikely to happen.”
The World Wildlife Fund plans to press for an extension of the 10-year moratorium when it runs out next year.
Conservation efforts in Yadua and other islands have demonstrated that turtle populations can expand significantly if the moratorium is observed. But in 2014 the monitoring programme ran out of financing, as the World Wildlife Fund put those funds toward saving species in greater danger of extinction.
And so, while participants used to get reimbursed for expenses like boat fuel and phone calls to report their data, now the monitors themselves have to absorb these expenses.
“I guess that is what makes it successful,” Tamata of the World Wildlife Fund says. “It is from the heart rather than for money.”
Qarau hopes that his conservation work will create a sustainable harvest, enabling Fijians to eat turtles again. He says he wants future generations to see turtles and be able to taste them. “When they grow up,” he concludes, “they will see the number of turtles is still good in the village.”