JEDDAH — When an ordinary-looking man in an ordinary-looking SUV arrived at the front gates of Fakieh Aquarium 18 months ago, the guards didn’t know what to make of it, but when he walked up to them and asked to see a man about a turtle, they knew whom to call.
Jay Bravo, who runs the sea life program at the Fakieh Aquarium, would probably have hugged the anonymous man if he had seen him. The turtle was identified as a hawksbill, a critically endangered species that has seen its numbers decline by 80 percent over the last century.
“The mere sight of that turtle was heartbreaking,” he said. “The man said that it got caught in his hooks while he was fishing somewhere south of Jeddah. If he had been less astute, that turtle would have been his dinner.”
For about 18 months, Bravo and a dedicated team of sea life experts nursed the creature they came to call Tutu back to perfect health. Now that her weight has more than tripled to 50 kilograms, they feel that Tutu is ready to head back into the open sea.
With a plan to put her back into the Red Sea scheduled for mid-November, their biggest concern is not whether she will be able to cope with the wild life at sea after having been confined to the aquarium’s tanks.
“What scares us the most is the probability of her mistaking a plastic bag for a jellyfish,” said Bravo.
The hawksbills' main diet is jellyfish, which look very similar to discarded plastic bags underwater, he explained.
“With Jeddah’s shores so notoriously polluted with plastic bags, it’s a major concern,” he said. “It only takes one plastic bag to kill her.”
This, explains Jamil Attar, executive director at Fakieh Leisure and Entertainment Group (Tarfeeh Fakieh), is the first of two concerns about Tutu’s survivability, the other being her getting fished out of the sea again and sold off as food.
While the aquarium’s rescue of Tutu is an important and inspiring story, the fate of hawksbill population in the Red Sea is a cause for alarm. Sea turtles, in general, have existed for more than 100 million years, and the hawksbill, in particular, plays an extremely important role in the Red Sea ecosystem, especially as it pertains to the sea’s world-renowned reefs. Some 1,200 marine species live along the reefs and the extinction of the endangered hawksbill would have a devastating effect.
By feeding off the jellyfish, sea sponges and sea grass that make the 2,000-kilometer reef their home, the hawksbill plays a vital role in controlling their numbers. This aids in the growth of the reefs which, in turn, provide the diet for many of the fish that humans often put on their dinner tables. These well-fed fish then grow in number and swim out to sea, boosting fish populations so that they are less likely to be affected by fishing.
"Take the hawksbill out of this equation and the entire system begins to collapse. Reefs will be overgrown with sea sponges and sea grass, fish will lose their feeding grounds, and fishermen will lose their livelihoods, while the rest of us deal with the loss of an important part of our diets," according to a press release from Tarfeeh Fakieh.
Many of the Red Sea reefs have already been decimated by urban development and accompanying toxic waste and pollution that have made the reefs uninhabitable for marine life like Tutu, it added.
Studies and projects are under way to mitigate the effects of human civilization on marine habitats, but the road to protection will be difficult to negotiate.
According to Bravo, King Abdullah University for Science and Technology (KAUST) offered to help implant a GPS transponder on Tutu so the aquarium team can keep track of her whereabouts and behavior in real time. By tracking behavior and movement, scientists should be able to gauge the effects of deteriorating reefs on the lives of hawksbills.
For all of its potential benefits, tracking Tutu does cause some trepidation.
“You know,” said Bravo, “I don’t want to run some coordinates on a signal on Google Earth one day and find them coming from the fish market in downtown Jeddah.”
Concluding his comments, Jamil Attar said: “The rescue and rehabilitation of Tutu highlights the leadership role of Fakieh Aquarium in spreading awareness about marine life and the preservation initiatives that we are implementing to ensure that the treasures beneath the surface of our beautiful Red Sea are still there for future generations to appreciate and enjoy.”
To find out more about hawksbills, watch the documentary telling the story of this critically endangered species: https://youtu.be/7DJ8leGWptg — SG
