Changing Tides on Deadly Shores.

• Author: Greenquist, Eric A.

A small village in the Rio Platano Biosphere Reserve of Honduras works to save endangered sea turtles

PAULICARPO CASILDO WAS A HUEVERO: A MAN WHO WALKED THE BEACHES AT NIGHT HUNTING THE SEA TURTLES THAT CRAWLED ASHORE TO LAY EGGS. A CARPENTER BY TRADE, CASILDO HELPED TO FEED HIS FAMILY BY SELLING THE EGGS AND MEAT OF LEATHERBACK, LOGGERHEAD, AND OTHER ENDANGERED SEA TURTLES. ALTHOUGH FOR YEARS HE HAD NOTICED DECLINES IN THE NUMBERS OF TURTLES THAT NESTED NEAR HIS VILLAGE, CASILDO BLAMED THE DROPS ON ILLEGAL HARVESTS BY LOBSTER AND SHRIMP FISHERMEN OFFSHORE.

Three years ago however, Casildo changed. "My children made me stop," he says. His children had learned in school about the harm the hueveros were doing to sea turtle populations. "One morning, after walking all night, I brought home eggs and my children refused to eat them." After that, Casildo says, "They would not leave me alone."

Casildo still walks the beaches at night. But now he hunts the turtles to protect them from other hueveros. Casildo's reformation is a result of an unusual project in the Rio Platano Biosphere Reserve of northeastern Honduras. Since 1995 Garifuna, Miskito, and Ladino villagers in Plaplaya, a community of six hundred persons, have rescued more than 190 turtle nests and released over six thousand hatchling turtles in the sea. In the process they have created one of the region's best educational laboratories, visited last year by more than thirteen hundred students from fourteen communities.

The Plaplaya project is small and faces many obstacles. But the hard work and dedication of the people of Plaplaya are changing attitudes on what, for sea turtles, had been a deadly shore.

The Garifuna and Miskito peoples of the region traditionally have survived through subsistence gardening, hunting, and fishing. During recent decades, however, almost every household has come to depend on a small cash income with which to buy tools, clothing, and other necessities. Most men now work on foreign-owned shrimp and lobster boats and are at sea for months at a time.

For hundreds of years, sea turtle eggs and meat were staples in the diets of coastal villagers. During the past thirty years, however, turtle populations have declined sharply. Shrimp trawlers killed adult turtles in their nets; lobster divers captured them for food. In 1987 biologist Gustavo Cruz, of the Universidad National Autonoma de Honduras, estimated that people killed 1,080 sea turtles each year in this manner along the northern coast of Honduras.

The hueveros added to the losses. Until 1995, says Dora Casildo de Jimenez, who coordinates the Plaplaya project, "Almost 100 percent of the turtles that arrived to nest in this area lost their eggs to the hands of man."

"People remember when they could walk the beaches at night and see dozens of turtles," says Adalberto Padilla of Mosquitia Pawisa, or MOPAWI, a nonprofit organization that helps the people of the region. "Now they must walk many nights to see just one."

Although they were aware of the declines, the villagers of Plaplaya felt powerless to stop them. They could not control the men on the shrimp and lobster boats. Even if villagers had been aware of the damage being done by the hueveros, the Direccion General de Pesca y Acuicultura (DIGEPESCA), the Honduran government agency responsible for protecting sea turtles, had no law enforcement officers in the region. To the villagers, the loss of the sea turtles meant the loss of a part of their culture and a growing dependency on outsiders for subsistence.

In 1994, however, MOPAWI director Osvaldo Munguia and U.S. Peace Corps volunteer Bonnie Larson began looking for a way to save the turtles. "The Rio Platano Biosphere Reserve," says Munguia, "is the largest and most valuable protected area in Honduras. The turtles are a vital part of the reserve."

Since DIGEPESCA had no local representative, conservation had to begin with local people. Munguia, Larson, and others from MOPAWI met with community representatives in several villages. The active interest of the schoolteachers in Plaplaya impressed them most.

Unlike many sea turtle projects that are run by nonprofit organizations and staffed...