DoE officer rescues green turtle from poachers
(CNS): Attempts by poachers on Grand Cayman to take a nesting green turtle were prevented at the weekend when Department of Environment Conservation Officer Chadd Bush found the animal trussed up on Saturday night. The turtle was flipped on her back with her flippers tied with rope.
Post-graduate researchers Joe Roche and Alessandra Bielli, who assist the DoE during nesting season and monitor the 24-hour Turtle Hotline, also responded to the call to examine the turtle and ensure she was uninjured before releasing her back to sea.
Highlighting Bush’s dedication to saving turtles, the DoE social media pages stated, “We would like to thank Chadd, the Turtle Team and all of the DoE’s dedicated Conservation Officers for protecting these endangered turtles who are symbols of the heritage of the Cayman Islands.”
This welcome news follows reports that a loggerhead turtle was lost to poachers on Cayman Brac last week.
Anyone who sees or hears about turtle poaching is asked to call DoE enforcement immediately, day or night:
Grand Cayman – 916-4271
Cayman Brac – 925-3647
Little Cayman – 925-7625
or call 911.
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Category: Marine Environment, Science & Nature
Just take a look at the Cayman Islands Animals Law, it was designed to stop cruelty to all animals.
Oh wait, the very first line makes it clear that it is a criminal offence to inflict cruelty upon any animal, with the singular exclusion of turtles.
In effect, you cannot be guilty of cruelty to a turtle.
The reason i hear you ask, well how do you think they get away with farming turtles and keeping them confined in tiny tanks?
It’s a deliberate exclusion so that they are not in breach of their own law.
Free the dolphins!
It is time to take turtle off the menus and sale of turtle.
Close Turtle Farm and set them all free! We’ll starve to death soon if this carnage is not stopped – Turtles we’re supposed to be raised to a size in order to fend for themselves from sharks snd other predator creatures if the sea! Thousands waiting to be killed by Govt licensed entity Cayman Turtle Farm after being Circe grown.
That’s not our Heritage! Survival was our Heritage eating turtle part of it!
Are there Caymanians with special license and political immunity to wreck “good” ships for insurance fraud and salvage, because that was also an “honorable” and celebrated vocation here for 400 years. In 2022, it’s past time to remove turtle from all menus and market, and lead the region with a credible conservation program.
The ocean is a plastic particle pool. Sargassum is destroying beaches, businesses, and killing shoreline fish. Stony coral disease is wiping out a few different types of coral (that we know of so far) and it’s only the first disease to show up. The mangrove destruction is slowly inching away at water visibility year-by-year around island….and instead of protected endangered animals, you’re eating them.
Cayman is past that certain point. You know what I mean? Now it is just a matter of gauging how bad is too bad and the negative affects it will have on another piece of the system.
But hey, you got high rises with 3,4,5,10mm price tags, owned by people who are never there. That will make difference, NOT
Good job to Mr. Bush, DoE Conservation and turtle team. Kind thanks to all for their great efforts.
Cow-wabunga this is like totally awesome! These babies turtles could grow up to be like the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles if they get the mutantagin. I’m so really for some pizza right now!
Chadd is extremely dedicated to his job. He once found me trying to take some eggs and gave me a big time lecture and then explained all these things about ecology that I didn’t understand before. Now I pass these on to my friends and there kids.
World Class. Thanks Chad.
why not wait until they return and arrest them?
The poachers are protected by powerful relatives .
Right?!
Would you return to a turtle, or say a break-in, that the police just chased you from in the hopes that the police had not freed the turtle or locked the door you broke open?
I mean, I’ve heard that criminals return to the scene of the crime, but that would be taking the cake.
They didn’t get chased off. They usually flip the turtle so it can’t move and then go and get more people or a suitable vehicle to transport it. They likely would have come back for it later.
Well done to the DOE enforcement officers and the turtle team!
People got to eat. Thanks PACT!
from what i see everyday…caymanians need to eat less.
Truth!! – Caymanian
From what I see, non-Caymanians need to move to the Cayman Islands less.
Ohhh good one. dork.
Sorry, we can’t. You guys are too unskilled so your country needs us. But you stick to eating endangered animals bobo.
How do you think your ancestors got here?
Una really starving then eat the chickens.. Fool
Me nah eat no damn fowl bredren.
But you will poach a turtle? Don’t be daft
Not many would actually poach a turtle, but many might eat poached turtle meat and might not even know. That is more accurate.
Now there’s a great idea!!
You guys eat enough Popeyes and Wendy’s.
The wrappers and containers on the roadsides, beaches and overflowing rubbish bins confirm this.
Why not catch the wild chickens and do something good for a change? They are free, and there is no bag limit.
Free range
we are caymankind……zzzzzzzzzzzz
Here’s a question for the DoE, who quietly oversaw the authoring, draft edits, and Gazetting of truly insane dual rule Regulations just months ago without any IUCN Red List concern, or the whistles around their necks blown:
The NCL Regulations 2022, allow for the taking of critically endangered (29 left) Loggerhead Turtles by “Licensed and Permited” between December and March?!? The Council can also exempt whoever they choose “from the Regulations, or any provision under the Regulations”. “Marine Conservation (Turtle Protection) Regulations (2008 Revision)” Repealed. The final paragraph strangely singles out immunity from prosecution for someone facing sentencing in a Dove Poaching incident.
http://gazettes.gov.ky/portal/pls/portal/docs/1/13140687.PDF
“Restriction on taking turtles” Page 9
8. A person who is licensed under the National Conservation (Licence and Permit) Directives, 2016 to take Green turtles (Chelonia mydas) and Loggerhead turtles (Caretta caretta) may only take such turtles in the amounts and of the sizes permitted under the licence during the months of December to March inclusive.
I’d like to hear the DoE and Wayne Panton’s opinion on why they would allow such a perverse loopholes to be Gazetted as Conservation Regulations, and/or when they feel it would ever be permissible to slaughter one of the last 29 breeding turtles, and who would be conferred that magic indemnity from prosecution?
Can you imagine the global headlines and geopolitical backlash if some despot African nation attempted to issue Black Rhino poaching licenses in 2022?!? This is arguably worse, and it’s codified into our Conservation Regulations. Incredible.
The politics of extinction…
Not to mention anyone from anywhere can purchase turtle meat in restaurants all over Cayman, all year round. Very mixed messaging for a critically endangered species that was brought back from extinction in Cayman by importing eggs from rookeries in other locations.
(NB December to March isn’t breeding season in the N hemisphere, regarding the assumption that the 29 turtles would be breeding turtles).
Turtle Farm sells turtle meat. That’s how restaurants have turtle on the menu all year round. You should try it. It’s good.
To 11:56 am:
It’s unfortunate that you chose to take a bit of a thinly-disguised downward slant in what appears to be a somewhat backhanded slur against the path Cayman took to very effectively reduce poaching while both greatly increasing the wild population of sea turtles, and respecting the culinary culture of the nation’s indigenous people.
This little island and its Cayman Turtle Centre, together with protective legislation and diligent enforcement, has shown the world the powerful positive impact on endangered sea turtle populations of these combined efforts to:
(a) Head-start endangered species, by raising them in captivity to a much more survivable age and then releasing them into the wild.
(b) Captive-breed and farm an endangered species in sufficient quantity to supply the national market, thereby avoiding poaching by satisfying the local indigenous people’s centuries-old demand for consumption of that species.
Please read the research. It is available online, free of charge, accessible to anyone who really wants to know the facts:
There was only one (1) green turtle nest in Grand Cayman in 1999, when the CI DoE began nest monitoring here.
By the time the University of Barcelona / University of Exeter / CI DoE study was done, this combined effort in Cayman resulted in “a current population of between 100 and 150 adult breeding females.” Annual green turtle nests now number in the hundreds. Encouraged by these positive results, in recent years Cayman Turtle Centre has been releasing more than a thousand captive-bred turtles a year into the wild: a combination of eggs, hatchlings, and head-starts.
These efforts that started in 1968 were very deliberate, very methodical, very patient and very determined despite many decades of naysayers which along the way even included some in the scientific community; but now the facts of the success have been published, by respected scientists and institutions:
https://www.ub.edu/web/ub/en/menu_eines/noticies/2022/03/048.html
and
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-29232-5
plus a related report published earlier, which is also very pertinent to this topic:
https://www.darwininitiative.org.uk/documents/DPLUS019/23876/DPLUS019%20FR%20-%20edited.pdf
Mariculture Ltd and Turtle Farm did indeed release good quantities of turtles into the 1980s, with studies dating back that far. But previous few viable turtles were released on your watch, and even fewer credible academic papers. The entire farm had to be rebuilt after Michelle, and all on our dime – hundreds of millions that could have gone into countless more important social benefit programs. That’s the record. You shouldn’t keep trying to take credit for work you didn’t do, and frankly, aren’t really doing today.
To 8:50 am:
Exactly where in what I said was I “taking credit for work I didn’t do”?
Please, we don’t need any more small-minded nonsense of cowering behind anonymity trying to turn this online discussion thread into some sort of personal potshot! Conservation and sustainability are topics far too important to allow them to degenerate into this sort of pettiness.
I simply stated facts.
This has been a sustained successful national effort over many decades involving generations of people, Mariculture Ltd., Cayman Turtle Farm, Cayman Turtle Farm (1983) Ltd., Cayman Turtle Conservation and Education Centre Ltd., Department of Environment, University of Exeter, University of Barcelona, University of Georgia, and the list of institutional and individual credits for what has been achieved for sea turtle wild populations in the Cayman islands goes on and on. Yes, the impacts of Hurricane Michelle in 2001 were devastating to the captive breeding herd – most of them got washed out to sea and only a fraction of the number remained to rebuild the head-starting and release program. Despite those challenges and many other hurdles to be overcome, the annual numbers of captive-bred sea turtles released into the wild annually from the Cayman Islands in recent years in the Cayman Islands has been consistently in the hundreds or more than a thousand – increasing to typically 1,300 or more. It has been an outstanding team effort.
Just the facts (and not cowardly Anonymous hate-speech!), substantiated by years of peer-reviewed published research, even though the truth may not suit whatever your personal agenda is.
Hang on one sec, you want to give the credit for repopulating the oceans with turtles to the same culture that brought them to the brink of extinction?
Bringing them back is good but you don’t get to pat the whole nation and it’s culture and heritage on the back when it’s that culture and heritage that decimated the population to the brink. Lobster and conch are on the same edge and every time we see someone arrested for poaching conch their attitude is “I’m Caymanian and this is my right!”
So let’s keep conserving but the past is something to be embarrassed about, not proud. Fixing something after breaking it is at best a net zero.
It would be interesting to know if they have issued sny licenses.
The public needs to scrutinise the National Conservation Council Minutes where they discussed why such abhorrent provisions needed to be baked into the finished Regulations – stalled deliberately for a decade! Whichever contemptuous members are behind this, they need to be exposed, and expelled out of the arena of conservation, and properly investigated by ACC for potential criminal conflicts.
No published Meeting Minutes since 11 Sept 2019, nearly three years ago. The National Conservation Council Chair McFarlane Conolly has some explaining to do.
https://conservation.ky/general-meetings/
Hear! Hear!
Tempest in teapot. The turtle licencing rule has been in the law forever and the problem now is not licenced turtle take. (Last I asked them they said no one was doing any licenced turtle fishing.) Do not confuse poaching with anything other than poaching.
What possible reason in 2022 would any endangered or critical listed wild turtle species need to be harmed, when we spend $100mln a decade on public subsidized abattoir meat, with the farm’s stated purpose to replace that historic activity? Explain rationale please.
The Conservation Regulations confer the authority on the Council to fully exempt special individuals from the entire Law and all Regulations with impunity. Is that a tempest in a teapot, or worthy of ACC investigation? I think the latter.
Police? Any investigation? What vehicles were in the area last night?
Just check the CCTV system… oh wait.
Didn’t we pay millions for it? Where is it?
Ask Eric.
Bicycles
Just the poacher’s pickup, as far as I know. The only footprints at the crime scene were the poacher’s footprints and the turtle’s.
Were any Moosehead cans or maple syrup drippings lying about? Those pesky Canadians are sneaky!
Why? DOE use exactly the same laws as the RCIPS, although the police, CBC, and coast guard avoid getting involved in anything so unglamorous as defending our natural heritage.
All you have to do in reality is get certain DOE officers to do their job, get realistic funding, and cross your fingers.
And if Cayman Brac had conservation officers we’d have one more turtle alive today. Next year we will be reliving the same story.
Need funding? How about redirecting the millions in turtle farm subsidies to paying locals to patrol.