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Tsunami brings turtles back to Phuket
Posted Mon, 10 Jan 2005
The tsunami that ripped away at Thailand's southwestern coast apparently brought unexpected visitors back to the tourist island of Phuket — endangered leatherback sea turtles, a report said on Sunday.
Leatherback sea turtles, one of the world's most ancient species, had been crowded off Phuket's beaches by the growing tourism trade and had not been seen for three years.
But environmentalists told The Nation newspaper that a boy on Mai Khao beach had discovered a leatherback nest with about 80 eggs.
Manop Tidsang, who heads a sea turtle conservation group, said he was confident the eggs were laid by a leatherback.
When the tsunami ripped through Thailand's resorts, it also wiped out trash from the beach and brought in clean sand from the bottom of the sea.
"In the past, sea turtles crawled up from the sea to lay eggs along Phuket's shores. But the invasion of people on most of the beach areas forced the turtles to change their place to lay eggs," associate professor Somchai Sakulthap told the paper.
The leatherbacks, placed on the critically endangered list, are viewed as a living fossil that has existed for 100 million years.
According to specialists, the main hazard to the turtles' survival is accidental capture due to modern fishing techniques which kill up to 40 000 of them a year.
AFP
