Sea Turtle Stories – Episode 9 (Part 2)

Kartik: Yeah, no, absolutely. You know, you’re right that the idea of use, the use of sea turtles, consumptive use of sea turtles has been sort of anathematic to turtle conservationists worldwide for decades now. And I gave a talk about this, we have an annual sea turtle symposium that sort of travels around the world. And this year’s symposium was in Thailand. And in my closing talk I sort of covered some of that history. And I point out that Archie Carr, who’s considered to be the father of sea turtle conservation, was one of the people that championed the idea that turtle populations around the world were declining and needed to be protected.But he loved turtle meat!

And in his own book, he says, he uses the phrase, one of my greatest sacrifices to the religion of sea turtle conservation is giving up turtle soup or turtle meat, right? In Windward Road, he talks about after the laws had been passed, he’d go into the local supermarket and confiscate cans of turtle meat saying, don’t you guys know this is illegal. And he said, I couldn’t bring myself to throw them away. So I take them back to my trailer and I eat them quietly. So I’m like, this man, if he were alive, he’d be the first person to say, I’m so happy to see these turtle populations rebound. Let’s start eating them again. Right? Archie Carr, I think, was doing what he thought was right for the time.But he recognised the cultural traditions and, and, would have been sympathetic to the idea of use.

A generation of American sea turtle conservationists, western, largely, mostly American, then for decades through the IUCN’s marine turtle specialist group and through the other sort of major organisations that they’re part of, campaigned across the world for cessation of sea turtle take, right? So most countries have no take laws, right? But most communities, most places where there are turtles, there are laws in most places that was driven by this model that came out of the west, primarily the US.

Some of it was targeted at, you know, the hawksbill turtle trade, you know, Cuba had stockpiled hawksbill turtle tortoise shell, Japan wanted to buy it, but they weren’t allowed to because of CITES, because all of these had now been placed on CITES. They were all classified as critically endangered on, you know, the red list. There’s been places, I think, I think maybe the Seychelles where they had these stockpiles where they actually publicly burned the stockpiles sort of as their commitment to sea turtle conservation.

Anyway, so decades of very strong opposition apart from mostly one guy called Nicholas Morozovsky who was at the University of Toronto. Toronto sort of like tirelessly campaigns in the opposite direction of that period of time, the 80s and the 90s and honestly the entire sort of American community of sea turtle conservationists, hated him for it and I say hated him for it. Some just professionally, some were like I completely disagree with his views.

Some of them really just disliked him to the core. But Morozovsky was one of the most rational people in the community and he would keep pointing out how these arguments were flawed. But, I go for my first sea turtle symposium in the late 90s, Morozovsky student Matthew Godfrey, his wife Lisa Campbell who is a social scientist and I organised a session on sustainable use at a conference in Malaysia in 2003.

The guys that we invited, some people from the croc specialist group and the croc guys have always been pro-use, right? And so they come in and they’re like let’s tell you how we do it. But that workshop, which was like a mini symposium, it sank without a trace. Nobody spoke of it again, never came up in conversation and all that pretty much happened was that, you know, they were like, oh, student Matthew Godfrey is just like him and that guy from India apparently is one of them as well, right? So we were all just cast as the black sheep of the community.

I mean, it’s a very friendly community so everybody’s like, you know, friendly to each other and it’s lovely but, you know, we knew that we were all on opposite sides of this debate.

15 years pass. There’s a panel at the Japan symposium, the theme of the Japan symposium is beyond protection, and they actually had a Japanese Beko artist there and the sea turtle conservationists who got offended because they said this is still not allowed by international law, it was offensive to have this person in.

Much of us said why? You know, it’s their tradition, you passed a law that, you imposed it in a way on the world. But the official theme of the symposium was beyond protection. We debated it at this panel discussion we had.

Fast forward to 2024 and three plenary speakers, two at the opening ceremony and me at the end and I pointed out to them that I said, you know, from being violently opposed to the idea of use, you had three plenary speakers at a symposium, all of who brought up sustainable use and all of us brought it up in a positive way, right? Like, are we finally beginning to see a slow shift in the community’s ability to talk about it?

You know, we’re not even saying you should start doing it tomorrow, but, you know, be open to the idea of a discussion and I think that we were able to stand up and say this out loud to, our community of 700 people, I think does in a way for me denote a little bit of a shift. The people sitting on the fence are probably saying, not saying it’s a good thing yet, but sure, let’s talk about it.

Minnie: For sure. That’s definitely got to be a first step because. It’s been, maybe a difficult topic, there’s been a lot of pushback and it’s not considered appropriate in many circles to discuss that, but yeah, of course, there has to be a place because it’s a large part of sea turtles’ life and their history as a species is intertwined with that. So it has to be discussed.

Talking about kind of consumptive use, is there like a slippery slope argument that legitimising that use could end up resulting previous levels of hunting and or harvest that we do know to be unsustainable. Would there be a risk, do you feel, of legitimising or allowing that consumptive use and maybe a knock on effect from that?

Kartik: So I think there’s a risk to both allowing it and not allowing it. And the risk to allowing it is what you said, is essentially poor regulation. But there already is poor regulation, which is leading to illegal take in a number of places. The problem with illegal and unregulated take is it’s hard to monitor and perhaps has even worse impacts than monitored, regulated take.

There’s sort of the philosophical question of, why is it OK to eat wild-caught fish? Of course, there will be people who will say we should stop eating turtles and fish and everything and move to plant-based diets. But I’m not going to get into an argument about that. Assuming that we acknowledge the need for, animal-based protein in human diets, then why are we drawing the line between here that this is not OK to consume at all, right? And if it is OK to consume, then the question only becomes a matter of regulation.

There’s another recent study, and I don’t remember the details of it, but it’s a global study that ballpark shows that where there still is take, most of the take’s happening in populations that can actually sustain that level of take. I think some of that’s legal and some of that’s illegal. I guess the legal ones are like the take in Ostional and so on, and there’s probably an illegal take of 1,000 eggs elsewhere.

And it’s showing that where that unregulated take is happening, it’s still happening in populations that appear to be able to sustain that level of take, right? So if you have monitored regulated take, you’re actually, if anything, improving what already exists. The slippery slope argument, you know, applies to everything, right? And so you, you mitigate that by having checks and balances. The government that allowed a certain take can always prohibit it again. So I think there’s also a fear of experimentation.

And, finally, there’s the complementary risk of, if you don’t allow take, then you’re losing, you’re sort of, you are losing social capital, right? Because there’s people that historically used it, have been prohibited from using it, and now seeing all those turtles out there and going, what the hell? This was never about the number, was it? You don’t care what happens to me. So there’s, loss of social capital there. I think there’s a loss of scientific capital, if you want to call it that, right? Because as I said, if you’ve based your premise on a scientific argument, and now you’re sort of like, it’s not about the science anymore, then why should I trust a dialogue with you? Because you just chose to change the goalpost. So I think there’s loss of trust in that as well. So there’s risks associated with taking that decision to not have take as well.

So everybody thinks of risk as only, you know, if I allow take, more turtles might die than I want them to, but what are all the other risks associated with your behaving, honestly, in my opinion, irrationally.

Minnie: You briefly mentioned before, about how to decide if consumptive use, becomes an aspect that we are utilising, where do we decide where that can be? And you mentioned Lakshadweep, the island where there is now a massive population of sea turtles. And actually we’re now seeing a seagrass decline, which will have knock-on effects that you mentioned.
Are those the sort of areas that the efforts would be perhaps initially focused or how would you sort of decide where that could occur?

Kartik: Well, at a practical level, it’s not even a conversation that I think we would be able to initiate in India. We’ve conflated a few things. We’ve conflated the vegetarianism of certain communities within India that also have been both economically and politically powerful communities and created some of the laws that we live with.

And we’ve marginalised a lot of the, indigenous tribal voices. We’re all indigenous, but the smaller, the tribal communities, the fishing communities, the forest dwelling communities. We’ve marginalised their voices in a way that, that their views of, of engagement with, nature, for example, have, have really not been internalised in our conservation laws or rhetoric, which basically means honestly, India thinks of itself as a country that will not harm animals. Especially with more charismatic animals, any talk of consumptive use is absolutely, anathematic at a global conservation, Western animal rights perspective, that has overlaid on, you know, some of our own sort of social structures and history to create this very protectionist regime. So it would never come up.

Lakshadweep is a 98, 99% Muslim community. Most Muslim communities don’t eat sea turtles. And, and so, you know, the killing of green turtles there was mostly to use the fat for caulking on boats. But there was, there was historical trade of turtles from Orissa and, and Tamil Nadu, the south of Tamil Nadu that have, green turtle populations have really declined.

But in Orissa, for example, in the late seventies, they used to catch tens of thousands of them and ship them across to West Bengal, where they’d be sold for the meat. If it were ever a possibility, I’d, I’d say there’s probably a reasonable market for turtle meat in Eastern India today that communities could benefit from. Now, many communities in India also believe in turtles as an incarnation of, you know, the Hindu god Vishnu. So there’s several communities that themselves might not want to be, you know, involved in taking turtles. But, there are others who would. And certainly with like, like in Ostional, there could be a massive amount of revenue from the eggs.

It’s funny, one of the first forest officers who, who worked there from the 70s, did his PhD, remained in the forest department until he retired. The book that came out of his PhD, his last chapter says, the economics of, you know, selling eggs, and he means eggs from the first few days, like, like in Ostional, as well as the sale of deformed and maimed turtles, he says.
It’s basically on the last day of the Arribada, you get these stragglers, you know, they’re like missing half a clipper, I’m missing half a carapace. And he’s like, if we, took the eggs at the beginning, this was how much the community could benefit. So this is a government officer actually writing about this as a chapter in this book, but the turtles have basically moved too far from being, being soup to superstar in everybody’s minds. So they kind of like, not quite on par with, but they’re like, nearly tigers kind of in India, right? So there’s, there’s social and political and ecological aspects to where you can initiate this, but there’s so many parts of the world where people have traditionally taken eggs or turtles that can replicate either the Ostional model or other models. So there’s plenty of places where people would be happy to start taking turtles again, legally. And if they have good embedded conservation monitoring programmes, I think it could be regulated as well.

Minnie: With the green turtles that are now really dominating the seagrass beds, that must have a knock-on effect, for example, seagrass beds are really important fish nursery. So the seagrass beds are a lot of places where a lot of baby fish start their life. And therefore the fish stocks will rely on the seagrass beds. And if the seagrass beds, unfortunately now are party to arguably an excessive amount of turtles that the seagrass beds can’t sustain that. How, how do we mitigate that? Or can we mitigate that knock-on effect that that may have on the fishing communities?

Kartik: That’s, that’s a really good point. And I think one of the main points of contention in the Lakshadweep was, is exactly that the conflict with the fishermen was less about turtles getting entangled in the nets. There was a bit of that, but the larger that they’d identified was that the loss of the seagrass beds was leading to loss of the bait fish that they used for catching tuna.
And, and so this has come up in, in many places. People have talked about, different approaches, including, you know, seagrass exclosures to actually create pens where it excludes sea turtles and allows sort of seagrass to, to recover and so on. I don’t know that there’s a, there’s a very straightforward answer to that question, right?

Minnie: No, this is a very, it’s a big question. There’s a lot of different people involved in a lot of different aspects involved in that.

Kartik: I think that, going out on a limb here, if those communities were responsible for regulating the turtles as well as they used to in the past, with certain checks and balances, that might, that might reduce the degree of conflict. So when the folks in Lakshadweep did kill turtles, I’m sure there were points of time where the turtle numbers went up as well, but maybe the seagrass beds are declining and, you know, maybe you want to cull a few in.

It’s not such a strange idea. People do this, the government does this in, in parks in Africa and the US and other parts of the world all the time, you regulate certain populations, which tend to sort of like blow up right. So it’s just that with sea turtles and the idea of communities regulating them themselves, you’d be like, oh no, we can’t do that.

Minnie: It’s definitely important for conservationists to consider this though, because for example, I think it was a paper or an article published regarding the conservation of sea turtles on an island called Orchid Island.

And they’d put a huge amount of conservation efforts in place to protect the sea turtles. And only after they had done that, they recognised that that protection, this protecting the sea turtles had actually negatively affected the terrestrial reptiles. And there were lizards that were nesting on that island and it caused a massive decline in the lizards because the lizards couldn’t access their nesting points.

And so it was really interesting to highlight to anyone working in conservation that of course there can be no one conservation method that will protect all important species and, and people in that area because you have to consider all of those aspects. And, if we really go down the sea turtle route, we can maybe lose sight, all of us as individual conservationists can lose sight of the wider picture of the interplay between all the species and the people involved in that ecosystem.

So earlier, you mentioned about the fact that olive ridley’s are classified as vulnerable. and that’s based on what we call the IUCN red list, which is an international body that has applied categories to a variety of different species, basically on how close to extinction they are. And, you said that we think there are like 2 million nesting female olive ridley’s, but their population is still classified as vulnerable.

Do you have any insight on how that’s been assessed and, and perhaps then why, why are they still classified as vulnerable if actually their populations are quite high? What’s the benchmark?

Kartik: Yeah, the IUCN, of course, is a large international organisation, but the rules for classification under the red list were devised by conservation scientists, right? And the criteria that they use are either a decline in population, absolute population size, the range of a species, and so on. A very, very large proportion of species, probably over 80%, are defined as particularly endangered or endangered or vulnerable based on the size of their range. Because we don’t actually have population numbers for most species of, you know, fish or frogs or lizards or snakes or birds.

We know where they’re found. So people draw range maps, and the size of that range often determines the tiny range, critically endangered, very large range, not endangered at all or least concerned, as the IUCN calls it.

So interestingly, all sea turtles would be classified as least concerned if we went entirely on the basis of range size. But the way it works is that you base your final assessment on the axis that is providing the most evidence of threat, right? So these are globally distributed species. For sea turtles, sea turtles don’t qualify on the basis of absolute abundance either. What they do qualify on is the basis of population decline over three generations, and we’ve argued for decades over what three generations constitutes, how many years that is, what historical numbers might have been, right? And so when you say the IUCN has a body that examines reports.

The reports for these assessments are actually carried out by specialists, for example, for turtles within the marine turtle specialist group. And that’s just a bunch of us scientists around the world who are people that spent a huge number synthesising, all the available data, and then based on that data saying that this is where I think it should be classified. All of these have actually recently been reassessed.

Olive ridleys were endangered. Now they’re considered vulnerable. Uh, I think leatherbacks were critically endangered and then reassessed as endangered. So they’ve all sort of, they’ve been downlisted, which is a strange phrase because I’m like, they’re doing better. We should be, we should actually say they’ve been uplisted, right? So it almost pains conservationists to move their species from a higher threat category to a lower threat category.

But the reason that despite these large abundances and distributions that assessors often, classify species like sea turtles, in threat categories, you know, if I compare it to frogs, it’s kind of absurd because it’s like a critically endangered frog is like a frog that’s sitting on one hilltop and has been seen five times in the last 20 years, right?

Minnie: Yeah.

Kartik: That’s a critically endangered frog. And you compare a critically endangered freshwater turtle or a frog with a sea turtle, it’s just, it’s cognitively dissonant.

But the reason that sea turtle conservationists and assessors still place them in higher threat categories than the numbers might indicate is because IUCN doesn’t distinguish between the ecological data, which is the range size and the population size and the level of threat, right? It sort of mushes them together. So they’re like, yeah, we know there’s lots of ridleys, we know there’s lots of leatherbacks, but if we took them off a threat category, then it would be open season. Then people would build, you know, ports and harbours and they destroy these beaches and they’d be like, oh, but turtles aren’t important.

So I need to keep it in a higher threat category because the threats are still contemporary. And the IUCN allows for that. It says if the threats still remain, so if you got an assessment of abundance or range, and then you assess parallelly with that, what the degree of threat is, but that gets sort of like combined together in a single classification term, right?

And so if I, if I told you what I thought, what vulnerable meant or endangered meant to a frog in terms of its likelihood of extinction, I’d say go way higher, right? So as an ecological term, then not really comparable between these different species.

And I think that’s a problem with the way the system’s set. And there’ve been critiqued by various people, including myself, but people accept this as, this is the best system we have and, you know, seems to be working.

Minnie: Yeah, I guess with our current evidence and expertise, that’s the best kind of classification system. There’s always refinement to be had, but like you say, the threats to their habitats are still present, and therefore we have to still consider that in our conservation efforts.

And that’s maybe worth mentioning that the IUCN doesn’t necessarily account for individual sub-populations of which there could be quite a lot of variation.

Kartik: Exactly!

Minnie: So there are some areas in the world where green turtles are doing a lot better.

Kartik: So actually the sea turtle community, thanks to these critiques you know, over the last 20 years, as well as papers that many of us wrote, moved to regional assessments some years ago. So now sea turtle populations are sort of assessed at a regional scale as well, which is a great improvement on the global assessment that we did before. But, but actually,some regions are better representative of populations than others, perhaps.

The decisions that we’re making about use and regulation are at even smaller spatial scales, right? And so sometimes the scale of the assessment doesn’t match the scale at which we’re carrying out conservation. But having said that, sort of refining the scale at which you assess and decide whether that population needs more stringent conservation measures, or use can be introduced, certainly would make much more sense at individual population levels.

Minnie: And before we finish, I just wanted to ask you regarding, you wrote a really awesome article called Decolonising Sea Turtle Conservation, you and a few others, which was sort of bringing together criticisms of neo-colonial structures and global north based conservation efforts that I think really needed to be talked about. Things like parachute conservation, which is the idea of someone coming in, trying to implement something and then jumping back out again. And it often tends to be people from the global north jumping into the global south in order to try and implement things that they have no basis and no kind of background to implement.

Could you tell us a brief bit about the article and what kind of prompted you to work on it?

Kartik: Well, I think, you know, the group that was involved, many of us have been thinking about these issues for a long time. Those of us working in the global south, as well as people working in the global north. And I was sort of first involved in an article about parachute science in marine research in general. It was about 10 years ago, we were at a workshop and sort of talked about a lot of issues and ecology and evolution of Indo-Pacific marine fauna, marine biogeography. And one of the things that came out of that meeting as well was this, was, was folks feeling like, borders were closing and they couldn’t, because of CBD, no longer go to places like Indonesia and other places and just sort of like collect samples, take them back and, you know, work on the taxonomy and genetics and so on. And, there was one group that was seeing that as an obstacle.

And there was a group that pushed back on that idea and said that actually, what we’ve seen traditionally as, as access is actually is, is extraction. Right. And so we started formally sort of putting articles together about this.

And more recently, I think I can’t quite recall what the trigger is, but I know that Brian Wallace and I have been talking about this for years. He comes, comes at it as the perspective of someone from the global north, who’s really concerned about the colonial practices of the past, but how they’re also embedded in, you know, in the work that we do now. And as I’ve said before, there’s a framing of it as global north versus a global south, western versus the rest of the world, you know, white versus people of colour and so on. But it sort of extends to all types of hierarchy.

You know, what, what gives me the right just because Andamans is part of India’s political territory, what gives me the right to go there and, and extract, right?

So I think we all have to ask ourselves that question is about what roles we’re playing there? What are we giving back? I think the context of colonial practices. it’stwo separate things. It’s one is the extraction of the science and the other is imposition of ways of living, right? And, you know, in one respect, the extraction of science is, is when you’ve gone to a place and, and done work by yourself that you could have done collaboratively with someone else, right? Or you’ve used someone’s knowledge as, you know, you’ve gone there and collaborated with local scientists and you use them basically as a local guide. They know where to take you but you’re not treating them as a peer in terms of science and this is still, still quite common across the world.

But in the conservation field, the other one has had a wider impact, right? The practice of imposing your ideas of what conservation is. And the question I ask myself is if I go to the Andamans, is there someone I can actually collaborate with over there, right? If there isn’t, then, I’ll work with local students or researchers or the local community are sort of working with you in the field. I think that’s all right because you’re still building slowly, it may take decades, as long as you’re building towards, eventually them having the capacity to do those things.

That’s one part of the story. The second, however, is a much contemporary question for me as to what am I imposing on them, right? Coming from, you know, Bangalore or, you know, the mainland of the subcontinent and saying, I now think that you guys should use your resources in the following way or stop using them. Are there other impositions that I’m bringing with me? And sometimes there are impositions that we can’t escape, for example, if I were to go to one of these communities and say, you know, those fish that you’re catching are actually, in the Wildlife Protection Act, you should stop catching them because it’s illegal.

I could entirely believe that, that that’s the wrong way of doing it, right? Like, I don’t believe that it should be protected or I don’t believe that that’s how the conservation of that fish take place. But I can’t change the law right now. So I’m still in that position of having to tell them what the law is. So I’m bringing an imposition with me. So I think we just need to be aware of all of our actions and what ways they’re positive and what ways they might be negative.

I think we’re honest to ourselves and willing to listen to people as equals, which I think both scientists as a community and conservationists as a community struggle with, to be honest.

Minnie: Well, yeah, like you talked about in the article, I think, and it’s come up a lot about what science looks like in different communities. We all have had a form of science and data taking and analysis. It may not have been formally written down in the ways that we understand it to be in the West and not statistically analysed in the same way, but there is that data, there is that knowledge and there is that experience. And actually now kind of expanding our idea of what, of what counts quote unquote as science, because actually so much more has always been that than what we’ve historically allowed in academic circles.

Kartik: Yeah, it sort of circles back to the point about whether the enterprise of conservation is about animals at all, right? And the fact is that it has so much to do with acknowledging the rights of people, respecting them, building trust relationships, I’m not suggesting that every action that we do should be directly beneficial to the communities.

There might be certain things that we want to do at a particular point in time that they see a cost for, but are willing to do because there’s some other benefit that they can gain. Or that’s a trade-off they’re willing to make for, for a cultural reason, right? And, and so I think building these relationships in a way that we can work on these solutions together, I think is a critical part of how we go forward from here.

Minnie: I highly, highly recommend that if the listeners that have not read this article that you really do, especially if you’re interested in conservation, it’s a, it’s a really important perspective, I think, on something that has not historically had much airtime and, and definitely needs to be challenged.

I guess I have one finishing question. It’s a very general one, but what is your sort of hope for the future of sea turtle conservation?

Kartik: I think I’d really like for, for sea turtle conservation to be viewed by the conservation community, as well as the public as embedded in this larger matrix you know, the sea turtles as part of, a larger system and a larger system that includes all of those, different habitats that they occupy, you know, the beaches and the reefs and the seagrass meadows and the open oceans and all of that, but that larger, larger system also having people and all of their connections with turtles.

So for me, I think sea turtles are doing all right. Sea turtle conservation, on the other hand, could certainly evolve to be more broad-minded and pluralistic and capture the wealth of ecological connections that sea turtles have, but also the richness of social connections that we have with them.

Minnie: Yeah, Actually, we’re very intertwined and we need to continue to look at it in that way.

I really, really enjoyed this conversation. Thank you, Dr. Karthik, it’s been so interesting.

Kattik: Yeah thanks Minnie

Minnie: Lots of points that I think maybe a lot of us haven’t considered before and things that we have not really added to our kind of conservation conversation, which is hard to say three times fast. But I really appreciate your insight and your experience and your knowledge. So thank you so much for joining us.

Kartik: Thanks, Minnie. It was great talking to you. And as I said, as you can tell by now I’m always happy to ramble about turtles.

You and me both. So hopefully we can do this again sometime. Thank you so much and have a great rest of your day.

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