On a beach in northeastern Qatar, six-year-old Lolwa waves goodbye to two baby hawksbill turtles — a species that has a one-in-a-thousand chance of surviving to adulthood.
Predators, climate change, fishing nets and marine pollution contributed to the classification of these narrow-beaked creatures as “critically endangered” in 1996.
However, a conservation program in Qatar is hoping to revive the dwindling species, releasing thousands of hatchlings into the sea each year, now with the help of young children.
Photo: AP
“As adults we are kind of beyond hope, but children have the power to really internalize all these things that they are learning ... and they make these habits part of their life,” said Clara Lim, a representative of the Dadu children’s museum that organized the initiative for youngsters.
The Qatari program was launched in 2003, and in the past five years has sent about 30,000 hatchlings into the sea, including 9,000 in 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic cleared the waters of their human visitors.
From April to June, Qatari environmentalists watch for female hawksbills that have arrived at Fuwairit Beach to give birth, measuring them, providing care if needed and sometimes attaching tracking devices.
The nests are moved from under the sand on the main beach and placed under an awning to protect them from tides and predators.
Sixty days later, at the time of hatching, “the good and healthy ones ... we release to the sea,” said Mohamed Seyd Ahmed, a wildlife expert at the Qatari Ministry of Environment and Climate Change.
“Other small or tired ones ... we release in a pool” to allow them to grow stronger first, he added.
The turtles “act as a vacuum cleaner,” consuming jellyfish and seagrass, so their decline has an effect “on all marine life,” Ahmed said.
One evening last month, young Lolwa was joined by eight-year-old Shaikha and nine-year-old Abdullah to release the baby turtles out to sea.
Close contact with the turtles has created a bond between them and the children, who have affectionately given the creatures names such as Sassa and Blueberry.
As the project hoped, attitudes are already changing among young Qataris.
“We cannot throw plastic in the sea because they [the turtles] will get caught in the plastic,” Shaikha said.
Poaching and a lack of space also threaten these animals that reach adulthood at 25 years and live 50 years on average.
As turtles instinctively return to lay eggs on the beaches where they were born, it would be possible to measure the success of the program, but not until 2028, when the first hatchlings released in 2003 come back to lay their eggs.
However, with 97 nests — each containing 80 to 120 eggs — on Fuwairit Beach this year, compared with 15 in 2012, there is already cause for optimism.
“The statistics show that there are more turtles coming to breed here,” Qatar Natural History Group president Thierry Lesales said.
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