Endangered turtles get support in Cyprus

By Michelle Kambas

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.