One of the ocean's most beautiful and ancient creatures, the turtle, may not survive more than another 30 years. Scientists believe extinction is now a real possibility because of man's seemingly insatiable desire to turn the turtle into ornaments, soup, traditional medicines, satay and omelettes.
Sue Miller, biodiversity officer with the South Pacific Regional Environment Programme (Sprep), an organisation set up by governments in the area, says: "If we go on as at present, most turtle species will have died out by early next century." That is a perilously short time left for an animal that has been around for more than a hundred million years.
The Pacific is home to the world's last great concentration of turtles. Populations in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean have already been severely cut, but even in the vast, largely uninhabited Pacific region, turtles are in trouble.
In French Polynesia there has been a 90 per cent drop since the 1970s in Green Turtles going ashore to nest; in Australia, an 80 per cent drop in nesting Loggerhead Turtles in the past ten years. Scientists also think there are now no more than a few hundred breeding Hawksbills, the turtle most prized for its decorative shell.
So worried are the South Pacific nations that they have declared 1995 the Year of the Turtle - the first time they have joined forces on a conservation issue.
Turtles can live as long as 100 years, and do not start breeding until they are 20 or 30 years old. So those around today are, in part, a reflection of the turtle "harvest" in the 1960s, when today's turtle parents were born. And it will be 20 or 30 years before the full effects of today's far higher killing rates become apparent.
One of the curious characteristics of these antediluvian creatures is that they return to nest only on the beach on which they were born. But 30 years on, they find that many of the isolated beaches on which they hatched have been developed for tourism. There, unable to lay their eggs, they die without reproducing.
Ms Miller is optimistic that the turtle can be saved. "It is not too late. We need to educate people on the Pacific islands to take fewer turtles, to question whether they really need to kill them, and above all we need to stop the slaughter of turtles prompted by tourists from the developed countries."
The main offender is probably Indonesia, particularly Bali. The Indonesians kill between 30,000 and 50,000 turtles a year to satisfy tourist demand. As a result turtles have not been sighted off Bali for several years, so the fishing boats go further into the Pacific for the catch. The turtles are brought back alive and kept for weeks in watery stockades, exhibited for Europeans, who are encouraged to ride them. Then, pinned through the flippers, they are slung on bamboo poles, and transported to back-street slaughterhouses, there to be laid on their backs and gutted while still alive. The meat is made into stew and satay, the eggs into omelettes, the shells are worked into ornaments: none of which is illegal.
International trade in turtles, however, is banned under the Convention of International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) legislation. So any tourist who takes a turtle product back home to Europe, America, Australia or Japan is breaking the law. The customs warehouses of Auckland, piled to the ceiling with hundreds of tortoiseshell items, bear witness to the inadequacy of the law to protect the turtle.
Rob Suisted, of New Zealand's Conservation Department, says: "This is a matter of ignorance, not a matter of people deliberately trying to break the law. Most simply have no idea the turtle is protected. They must be educated."
The Year of the Turtle aims to to do just that. Ms Miller says: "The only thing that will stop the slaughter of turtles in Bali and other exotic holiday destinations is for the tourists themselves to refuse to eat turtle meat or to buy tortoiseshell ornaments.
We have to tell the Pacific people their turtles are unique. Once they are gone, they won't be replaced." She emphasises that they are not asking islanders on subsistence diets to give up turtle meat completely, but to reconsider their practices.
The campaign has scored its first success. Fiji recently said it would ban commercial trade in turtles for a year and Sprep wants other island nations to follow suit. Conserving turtles can work only as a co-operative effort because they migrate up to two thousand miles across the Pacific to breed, passing through the waters of several countries.
As Noah Idechong, a marine resources officer from the island state of Palau, says: "What is the point in our protecting turtles for them to be caught by the Indonesians?" Sadly, Indonesia is not part of this campaign.
In Tahitian mythology, the turtle is a messenger from the gods. In the next few years, it is a line of divine communication that may cease to exist.
