How to Survive in Cambodia: For a Turtle, Beneath Sand

One of the world's rarest freshwater turtles has been discovered on an isolated stretch of the Mekong river in Cambodia, raising hopes that the species can be saved from extinction (AFP/WWF/File/You Porny)

May 18, 2007
Sambor Journal

By SETH MYDANS The International Herald Tribune (Paris, France)

SAMBOR, Cambodia — With the self-confidence of tens of millions of years of instinct, 12 tiny turtles raced down a mud bank of the Mekong River on a recent day, plopped into the water and disappeared with a wriggle under the sand.

It was a moment of relief for the man who released them, David Emmett of Conservation International, who had kept them at home in little plastic tubs since they hatched two weeks before.

“It wouldn’t have been too good to have a bunch of endangered turtles die in your bathroom,” he said.

Now they were on their own, carrying the hopes of scientists who are trying to preserve one of the last pristine stretches of the river.

Known as frog-faced turtles for their strange blank stares, the hatchlings are members of an endangered species — Cantor’s giant soft-shelled turtles — that was recently rediscovered here in northeastern Cambodia.

The shrinking of their habitat to this small nook of landscape and the dwindling numbers of Mekong giant catfish and Irrawaddy dolphins here are signals that the complex ecology of the river is quickly fraying.

“The area we are working in is the best of the whole river, all of it, from China all the way down,” said J. F. Maxwell, who has surveyed the lower Mekong. “China is all wrecked.”

Until recently it was war that saved the turtles, but it is peace that threatens them now. For decades this 30-mile strip of river was a refuge for Khmer Rouge guerrillas, the armed remnants of the regime that cost the lives of 1.7 million people from 1975 to 1979. The area became accessible when the guerrillas disbanded at the end of the 1990s.

As a no man’s land it offered a haven for rare plants and animals that have fallen victim to development in safer places. “It’s an emergency to get this place preserved, because if it goes there’s nothing to replace it,” said Mr. Maxwell, who is curator of the Chiang Mai Herbarium in Chiang Mai, Thailand.

“They’ve had their war, they’ve killed their people, and the second generation is coming in now,” he said of the Cambodians. “Motorboats are coming up the river, people are moving in, and no one is controlling this.”

In the natural course of things, two or three of the released baby turtles will survive, grow into giants the size of a sofa and live for as long as a century, almost all of it buried under the sand, Mr. Emmett said.

Or they will all die, victims of overfishing, pollution and environmental degradation, bringing their endangered species closer to an end.

“These things have survived the extinction events that wiped out the dinosaurs and now we’re going to wipe them out,” said Mr. Emmett, a wildlife biologist based in Cambodia. “Look, we can’t let them go extinct now.”

The huge and little-studied Cantor’s turtle (Pelochelys cantorii) seems to have already disappeared from the neighboring countries of Vietnam, Thailand and Laos. It was last spotted in Cambodia in 2003, and nobody knew until now whether it still survived.

In March a team that included Conservation International, the Cambodian government and the conservation group WWF, formerly known as the World Wildlife Fund, made the first survey of the area since it became safe to explore and found it teeming with the diversity of a complete ecosystem.

“The existence of such an extensive area of natural habitat that still borders the Mekong is almost unthinkable,” R. J. Timmons, a bird and mammal expert, wrote in a report for the WWF. He called for the creation of a haven along this stretch of river, and the WWF said local fishermen would be hired as monitors and paid for reducing their catch.

To everybody’s surprise, a group of young researchers, the Cambodian Turtle Conservation Team, using a trap of its own invention, immediately confirmed the presence of Cantor’s turtles in the area, capturing and releasing a 24-pound turtle in March.

Soon afterward they captured a young seven-pound female that Mr. Emmett studied for a month at his home in Phnom Penh before releasing it together with the dozen hatchlings. The researchers also found a trove of eggs, some of which hatched in his bathroom.

What he observed was a very peculiar turtle.

Without a shell to protect it, he said, the turtle spends more than 95 percent of its life almost motionless under the sand, surfacing just twice a day to take a single huge breath. It emerges once a year to lay its small round eggs on the riverbank.

The secret of longevity that it offers is to sit in one place, preferably under a layer of sand, and do nothing. “It’s a very boring lifestyle, really,” Mr. Emmett said.

But when it does move, it strikes with the lightning of a snake rather than the leisure of a turtle. When its tiny eyes, protruding from the top of its head among the grains of sand, spot a shrimp or a fish or a crab, the turtle shoots its neck out the way a chameleon shoots out its tongue.

“It strikes faster than a snake,” Mr. Emmett said. “I have seen cobras striking, and this is easily the same speed. And it has the hardest bite of any animal known to man.”

Its very longevity goes to show the success of the turtle’s adaptation, he said. But the environment today, crowded with human predators, presents challenges of a new sort.

As Mr. Emmett released his turtles into the water plants and grasses at the side of the broad, brown river, a fisherman towing his net drifted idly nearby, watching.

The modern history of the Mekong, with its fishermen, its factories, its polluters and its dam builders, does not offer much hope to conservationists, Mr. Maxwell said.

“We get together, all of us, and it’s the same story,” he said of ecological specialists. “I talk about plants, others talk about fish, others talk about birds and amphibians. It’s the same story. Things are going down the tubes. It’s all going.”