Sea Turtle Numbers Explode After Decades of Protection

The photo was taken byShaneMyers Photography/Shutterstock.

Sea turtles and their eggs were considered such a delicacy in the 1700s that traders would travel to a remote atoll in the middle of the Indian Ocean to gather great numbers of the reptiles and ship them to far-flung soup bowls in Paris and England. The culinary trend was so popular that the Seychelles government was purportedly giving out licenses in the early 1900s for the take of 12,000 green sea turtles on Aldabra Atoll, a large atoll roughly 1,120 kilometers from the nation’s capital, Victoria.

Turtles and in particular turtle soup was a delicacy for the higher tiers of the British Empire, according to Adam Pritchard, a conserver with the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom.

By the 1960s, the beaches of Aldabra only saw about 2,000 egg clutches per year, because of the impact harvest had on the population. Researchers estimated that only 500 green sea turtles were laying eggs on the beaches at that time, since green sea turtles typically lay between three to five clutches of eggs.