Endangered turtles get support in Cyprus

LARA BAY, Cyprus (Reuters Life!) - To the untrained eye, a small depression on the beach means nothing. For Cyprus's vigilant turtle watchers, it's a sign of life about to burst forth from scorched grains of sand.

Every year from the end of July to the end of September, these tiny black reptiles, whose ancestors were contemporaries of the dinosaurs, haul themselves to the sand's surface and painstakingly crawl to the sea.

Small enough at birth to fit into a child's palm, females will hit land again as adults in 25 to 30 years time, thanks to a genetic homing device that makes them return to the beach where they hatched so as to carry on the reproductive process. Males will never return.

Before Cypriots Andreas Demetropoulos and Myroula Hadjichristophorou pioneered turtle conservation in the Mediterranean in 1978, populations of the green turtles had collapsed, hunted to the brink of extinction.

Still working the Cypriot beaches thirty years on, they can take credit for boosting the on-land survival rate by over 400 percent, overseeing about 20,000 hatchlings reaching the sea every year. For the 2008 season estimates indicate there may be as many as 40,000.

"Their survival after that is anyone's conclusion," says Demetropoulos, who provides training to other Mediterranean nations for turtle conservation management.

"We estimate that, all things being equal, that (additional) 400 percent is making a difference."

HUNTED

Turtles have been around for 200 million years and in the Mediterranean for the past 10,000 years.

Prized last century for turtle soup and their meat, hunting all but exterminated the populations of green turtles, with an estimated 60,000 greens wiped out from the eastern Mediterranean between 1920 and 1970.

There are now less than 3,000 green turtles and about 10,000 loggerheads left in the Mediterranean, both endangered.

A possible sign that conservation is bearing fruit, nestings of loggerheads have risen to over 300 from less than 200 in just the past three years, according to Hadjichristophorou, who heads the conservation project at Cyprus's Department of Fisheries and Marine Research.

"It might be a combination of conservation and changes to weather patterns, but we cannot come to a definitive conclusion as yet," Demetropoulos said.

LIFE FROM THE SAND

The nests and hatchlings are easy to miss, but for the trained eye there are tell-tale signs.

A depression in the sand suggests the pear-shaped nesting chamber, which provides space and oxygen for the leathery eggs to incubate in, has effectively run its course.

Once the turtles have broken through their ping-pong sized shells and head to the surf, they become easier to spot.

The darker colored ones with knobbly shells, the most common in Cyprus, are loggerheads, while greens are slightly larger, have a shinier shell and a white underbelly.

"They hatch at night, and they will head to the lightest point on the horizon, which is the sea," said Demetropoulos. "But artificial light will disorientate them."

Greens create large ruts as they crawl up the beach to nest. "You can't miss it, the beach looks like it's been mowed by a tractor," said Hadjichristophorou.

She recalls her first encounter with turtles in 1976, when the island's tourism potential was still largely untapped.

"We saw a pit, and some empty shells," recalled Hadjichristophorou, a marine biologist. "When we looked closer and dug a bit we saw turtles popping out, I couldn't believe my eyes," she said. "In retrospect we realized that this was a nest partly dug up by a fox".

Conservation still faces obstacles. Natural predators have been around for thousands of years but it is the impact of humans which is making a dent, either through hunting, or via entanglement in fishing gear.

Natural habitats are now coming under threat from the thriving tourism industry -- one area earmarked for development abuts a natal beach of loggerhead turtles in the north-west. It is a Natura 2000 site, part of an EU-wide network of environmentally protected areas.

Hadjichristophorou and Demetropoulos say they want some parts of Cyprus to remain as they were. "In retrospect I think our work was at least partly related to the fact we loved Cyprus as it was, and we wanted to keep at least a part of it as it was," said Demetropoulos.

"It would be a shame for future generations to lose that quality of life."

(Editing by Matthew Jones)