{"id":27085,"date":"2019-05-07T00:05:44","date_gmt":"2019-05-07T07:05:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/hakaimagazine.com\/?post_type=custom_features&p=27085"},"modified":"2022-01-17T10:21:56","modified_gmt":"2022-01-17T18:21:56","slug":"tough-sell-of-turtle-saving-tech","status":"publish","type":"custom_features","link":"https:\/\/hakaimagazine.com\/features\/tough-sell-of-turtle-saving-tech\/","title":{"rendered":"The Tough Sell of Turtle-Saving Tech"},"content":{"rendered":"

Fisherman Firman bin Jawasa remembers the catch well. He was 20 years old and trawling for shrimp with his uncle in the coastal waters off northern Borneo, Malaysia, when something in their heavy net started thrashing. Caught inside was a frenzied sea turtle, snapping at the net. The turtle was too difficult to handle so they left the net in the water hoping the meter-long creature would escape. Soon after, to Firman\u2019s relief, the turtle bit through the net and fled.<\/p>\n

Eighteen years later, Firman is now the captain of his own shrimp trawler. In 20 years of fishing he says he has caught only that one turtle, but a 2007 survey of fishermen in his home state of Sabah suggests that each year almost 4,500 turtles accidentally drown in shrimp trawler nets.<\/p>\n

Sea turtles are protected in Malaysia, and the law prohibits harming or keeping them without permits. Eager to avoid any hassle, most fishermen don\u2019t report by-catch, so it\u2019s almost impossible to know exactly how many turtles die in this way. But with turtle populations dwindling due to habitat destruction and poaching, every by-catch death is one too many. And a panicked turtle damages trawl nets, too. Everyone loses when a turtle is caught in a net.<\/p>\n

But there is a solution\u2014a low-tech turtle excluder device (TED), a metal grate that stops a turtle midway into the net and directs it out a hole in the net\u2019s side. The target species of nearshore trawl fisheries, usually shrimp and fishes including small rays, simply pass between the grate\u2019s bars and are caught at the end of the net. But, while a TED sounds like a simple win-win fix for fishermen and turtles, it hasn\u2019t seen widespread adoption among the Malaysian fishing fleet. That\u2019s a situation some turtle advocates are striving to change.<\/p>\n

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The US National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) started developing TEDs in the 1980s, inspired by shrimp trawlers in South Carolina and Georgia who added grids to their nets to exclude jellyfish that frequently clogged them. After several design iterations, today\u2019s TEDs are elegantly simple and relatively easy to install. While a fisherman skilled with a needle can weave a TED into his net within hours, persuading him to do so can take years. In Malaysia\u2019s case, it\u2019s taken decades and the persistence of turtle researcher and conservationist Nicolas Pilcher.<\/p>\n

\"Nicolas<\/a>

Nicolas Pilcher (left), from Malaysia\u2019s Marine Research Foundation, shows a fisherman how to install a turtle excluder device (TED). Photo courtesy of Marine Research Foundation Asia<\/p><\/div>\n

Pilcher, who\u2019s British and now a permanent resident of Malaysia, started studying sea turtles in the 1980s. Then turtle numbers began to drop, and he realized that they might go extinct during his research career. \u201cThat was a big revelation for me. At that point I changed my focus,” recalls Pilcher, who set up a nonprofit organization, the Marine Research Foundation (MRF), to do conservation work.<\/p>\n

But Pilcher, who describes himself as more \u201crealistic and pragmatic than many conservationists,\u201d says he isn\u2019t exactly a turtle savior. \u201cI have nothing against people eating a turtle. I have something against somebody eating the last turtle.\u201d<\/p>\n

Historically, four species of sea turtle\u2014hawksbill, leatherback, olive ridley, and green\u2014nested in Malaysia and they\u2019ve long been an integral and proud part of local identity. In 1986, when delegates arrived at an international travel conference hosted in Malaysia they were welcomed by banners showing a leatherback turtle wearing sunglasses. The soccer team of a state known for turtle nesting is fondly called Penyu, the Malay word for turtle, and the country\u2019s 20 ringgit bill has an image of two turtles, a leatherback and a hawksbill. Yet despite this attention, only one species, the green turtle, shows stable numbers. Populations of the other three have greatly plummeted. Apart from one surprise sighting in 2017, the iconic leatherback turtle has not been spotted for decades.<\/p>\n

While another animal can replace the turtle on logos or currency, there is no ready replacement for the turtles\u2019 ecological roles in the sea. Sitting relatively high in the marine food web, turtles eat middle predators including jellyfish. And since jellyfish dine on shrimp and fish, these seafoods would decline if there were fewer turtles to rein in the jellyfish.<\/p>\n

In 2007, Pilcher surveyed Sabah fishermen to estimate how fisheries affect large marine animals, including manatees, dolphins, and turtles. He was shocked to find that thousands of turtles drown in shrimp trawler nets every year, but he knew that there was a solution in TEDs, a technology that was gaining traction in sea turtle conservation. \u201cThis isn\u2019t one of those unsolvable problems on the planet,\u201d says Pilcher. \u201cWe just needed to do it. That was the beginning of the TED program [in Malaysia].\u201d<\/p>\n

Malaysian officials, however, were wary about adopting TEDs because of a contentious history. In the late 1990s, the United States stopped importing shrimp from trawlers that did not have a TED or equivalent turtle-friendly measures. Malaysia and several other shrimp-exporting countries challenged the trade restriction at the World Trade Organization (WTO), calling it a disguised protection for the United States\u2019 domestic fisheries and discrimination against certain nations. But after the United States revised its sea turtle protection laws to comply with WTO rules, the restriction held, and Malaysian shrimp trawlers have not sold to the American market since. \u201cAt that time, TED was a bad word,\u201d says Pilcher with a laugh.<\/p>\n