|
For Turtles’ SakeBy Karoline Cullen
It began when an injured turtle was brought to the hotel and manager Pascal Fouquet agreed it could stay in the hotel lagoon to be cared for. Quietly, a program for sheltering injured turtles and raising hatchlings developed. Green sea turtles are endangered and Fouquet’s program aims to bolster the population in French Polynesia. Eggs, from nests that might otherwise be destroyed by high tides, torrential rains or drought, or disturbed by predators such as rats, dogs, sea birds, or other nesting turtles, are brought to the enclosure and incubated for about 60 days.
Turtles are a traditional food in Polynesia. Changing those dangerous-for-turtles traditions begins, not with the adults, but with their children. School classes are brought to the sanctuary and each “adopts” a baby turtle. They return to visit “their” turtle as it grows. When it’s going to be released, the children come to bid it farewell. Fouquet laughs delightedly about the phone calls he gets from parents, asking what their children have been taught because they don’t want to eat turtle anymore.
Turtle release day is never advertised. Without ado, the turtles raised in the sanctuary are quietly freed into the wild to make their way. These are ancient creatures, having first appeared more than 200 million years ago. With the help of Fouquet’s environmental vision to preserve them, they will be around a while longer. FYI: Le Meridien Bora Bora operates the turtle sanctuary
in association with the Ministry and the Delegation of the Environment.
www.boraboraturtles.com Photos by Karoline and Gary Cullen |
|
TM
Sebastian is checking all the usual hiding places -- under
rocks and along the fence line of the enclosure. Satisfied that all eight babies
are accounted for, the morning ritual continues. He tosses tiny chunks of tuna
and raggedy pieces of lettuce into the water and the baby turtles, barely the
size of his palm, come out of hiding and gulp their breakfast.
It’s morning feeding time at the Marine Turtle Protection
Center in the Hotel Le Meridien Bora Bora, in French Polynesia. Sebastian, a
lanky French ecologist, is giving a bilingual history of the turtles in the
lagoon as he works. For a hotel chain known for its luxury, in one of the most
exotic spots a traveler could hope for, the turtle sanctuary is as far away from
glitz as you can get.
Sebastian picks up one of the three week old baby turtles.
It’s cute in a cartoon character sort of way, with a shell
dark brown on top and light underneath. Protected and nurtured with regular
feedings, it will grow somewhat larger than it would in the wild. When it’s big
enough, it will live in the lagoon for about two years. Providing it can evade
the dangers of man, sharks, pollution, and trawl nets after being released, it
will grow to about 160 centimeters in length and weigh 230 kilograms.
Next to the baby turtle enclosure, two dozen larger turtles
are milling about at the lagoon’s edge. Their russet brown and cream shells
glint in the sun sparkled water. They know it’s feeding time and they thrash
against each other to devour their tuna and lettuce. The turtles are omnivorous until they reach breeding maturity at about
age 20, then they become herbivores. Their diet colours their fat green and
hence their name, green sea turtles.
Olive was born underdeveloped and is separated from the
rest of the turtles. She’s hand fed because she cannot yet tussle with the
others for food and is specially exercised to help her muscle development. To
keep her shell free of algae, Sebastian gives her a sand scrub spa treatment.
In another area is an exhausted turtle; it
took a wrong turn at the equator and landed up in Bora Bora instead of South
America, where it belongs. It too is carefully attended. Intense individual
attention to the welfare of each turtle, along with educating hotel guests and
locals, is what makes this program work.
Leaving
the enclosure, I don snorkel gear and slip into the palm fringed lagoon. Bora Bora’s Otemanu
Mountain towers in the distance. The water is crystal clear and as warm as a
bath. A myriad of fish dart around coral and there’s a grumpy looking eel
sitting in a cluster of rocks. I float over a turtle having a snooze on the
sandy bottom. Off to one side, another turtle serenely swims by, languidly
flapping its flippers. It lifts its head every 30 seconds or so to breathe
and in between, stops to snack on plankton by a rock.
Two turtles come towards me and I give them some space. As long as I don’t get
too close, they let me swim along.