A dying turtle breed points to a battered China

Jim Yardley, International Herald Tribune 5 Dec 07;

CHANGSHA, China: Unnoticed and unappreciated for five decades, a large female turtle with a stained, leathery shell is now a precious commodity in this city's decaying zoo.

She is fed a special diet of raw meat. Her small pool has been encased with bulletproof glass. A surveillance camera monitors her movements. A guard is posted at night.

The agenda is simple: The turtle must not die.

Earlier this year, scientists concluded that she is the planet's last known female giant Yangtze soft-shell turtle. She is about 80.

As it happens, the planet also has only one undisputed, known male. He lives at a zoo in the city of Suzhou. He is about 100. They are the last hope of saving a species believed to be the largest freshwater turtles in the world.

"It's a very dire situation," said Peter Pritchard, a prominent turtle expert in the United States who is involved in efforts to save the species. "This one is so big and it has such an aura of mystery. One can't ignore its importance."

For many Chinese, turtles symbolize health and longevity, but the saga of the last two giant Yangtze soft-shells is more symbolic of the threatened state of wildlife and biodiversity in China. Pollution, hunting and rampant development are destroying natural habitats and endangering plant and animal populations.

China contains some of the world's richest troves of biodiversity, yet the latest international survey of plants and animals reveals a bleak picture that grew bleaker during the past decade. Nearly 40 percent of all mammal species in China are endangered. For plants, the situation is worse; 70 percent of all nonflowering plant species and 86 percent of flowering species are considered to be threatened.

An overriding problem is the fierce competition for land and water.

China's goal of quadrupling its economy by 2020 means that industry, growing cities and farmers are jostling over a limited supply of usable land. Cities or factories often claim farmland for expansion; farmers, in turn, reclaim marginal land that could be habitat. Already, China has lost half of its wetlands, according to one survey.

For the Chinese scientists and conservationists trying to reverse these trends, the challenge begins with trying to convince the government that protecting wildlife is an important priority. For centuries, Chinese leaders emphasized dominance over nature rather than coexistence with it. Animals and plants are still often regarded as commodities valued for use as medicine or food, rather than as essential pieces of a natural order.

"The whole idea of ecology and ecosystems is a new thing in the culture," said Lu Zhi, a professor of conservation biology at Peking University.

Scientists say China's status as a leading center of biodiversity makes the threatened state of wildlife a global concern.

Many of China's species are concentrated in the mountainous southwestern region - sometimes popularized in the West as Shangri-la - as well as in Tibet, Hainan Island and along the North Korea border.

Endangered indigenous species include the Chinese tiger, the giant panda, the Tibetan antelope, several varieties of pheasants and monkeys and a range of small mammals including shrews and rodents.

"China is one of a small handful of countries, maybe a dozen, that has remarkably high numbers of species and a remarkably high number of species that are not found anywhere else," said Jeffrey McNeely, chief scientist for the World Conservation Union, the world's largest conservation network.

Nearly every major international conservation group has established a China office to promote different wildlife protection initiatives. Public education campaigns are under way, including one by a British group, WildAid, which has featured billboards with the Chinese basketball star Yao Ming.

"Endangered species are our friends," Yao said at a news conference last year in Beijing, where he called on Chinese to stop eating shark fin soup, a delicacy synonymous with wealth.

China has established an extensive system of nature reserves, mostly in the country's more remote western regions, and maintains a national list of endangered species.

No Chinese protection program is considered more successful than the robust effort to save the panda. Forty government panda reserves now have about 2,000 pandas living in the wild. Other captive breeding programs have helped pull the Chinese alligator and the Tibetan antelope away from the brink of extinction.

But these successes targeting animals of symbolic national importance are matched by other species that have disappeared, often because of neglect.

Last year, after enduring years of hunting and pollution, the Yangtze River dolphin, a freshwater mammal also known as the baiji, was declared extinct. This year, an amateur video captured a white flash in the Yangtze that might have been a baiji but conservationists remain deeply concerned. Twenty other animal species are deemed near extinction. Hundreds more are considered critically threatened.

"So many species are neglected," said Lu, who also heads the China affiliate of Conservation International. "Look at the baiji. The extinction was announced and what has been done? Nothing. People felt pity."

Then, alluding to the giant Yangtze soft-shell, also known as the Rafetus swinhoei, she added: "This turtle will be next."
A gift from a circus

Fifty-one years ago, a traveling circus performed at the new zoo in Changsha and left behind a large female turtle for a cash payment. Zookeepers slipped the turtle into a large pond, where for a half-century it hibernated in winters and poked its pig-like snout above the water's surface every spring. The concrete walls of the zoo became the equivalent of a time capsule.

Outside, the convulsions of modern Chinese history were scarring an already damaged landscape. Under Mao Zedong, national campaigns were waged to kill birds, snakes and other animals perceived as pests. Widespread famines in the late 1950s and early 1960s drove desperate people to hunt or gather anything deemed edible, even tree bark.

Since the 1980s, the pressure has intensified with the rapid push for economic development.

Many remote regions with natural habitats that conservationists once considered "quiet areas" have now begun opening up, as new highways and other roads are penetrating almost every corner of the country. Pollution, meanwhile, has severely contaminated lakes and river systems.

In Changsha, zookeepers knew little about their female turtle and had no idea that turtle experts were scouring China for the same species. "We just treated it like a normal animal," said Yan Xiahui, deputy director of the zoo. "We didn't expect it would be so important."

Nor, for many years, did many others. In the 1870s, a British diplomat in Shanghai sent a specimen to the British Museum, where it was beheaded, pickled in a large jar and forgotten.

"It proceeded to be ignored by the world as if it didn't exist for roughly

100 years," said Pritchard, the American expert. "Finally, people began looking at the one in the British Museum and realized this had value, it was a real species."

With its wide, flat shape and leathery dorsal shell, the male giant Yangtze can weigh more than 100 kilograms, or 220 pounds.

By the 1990s, a prominent Chinese herpetologist, Zhao Kentang, had realized the significance of the turtle and tried in vain to persuade different zoos to bring the turtles together for breeding.

By 2004, after conducting field surveys in China and Vietnam, herpetologists concluded that six of the turtles were still alive. Three were in Chinese zoos in Beijing, Shanghai and Suzhou, two others reportedly lived in a Buddhist temple in Suzhou and a sixth lived in a lake in the center of Hanoi.

Negotiations began to reach a breeding agreement. By 2005, the turtle in the Beijing zoo had died. Questions also emerged about whether the Hanoi turtle was actually the same species. A leading Vietnamese expert argued that it was not. Monks at the Buddhist temple considered their turtle a religious icon and did not want to move it.

Last year, a deal was finally reached between the Suzhou and Shanghai zoos.

"Then in October, the one in Shanghai died," said Xie Yan, the China program director for the Wildlife Conservation Society, which has been instrumental in guiding the discussions. "It was horrible news. We thought there was no hope anymore."

In January, herpetologists gathered in Suzhou for a conference about the turtle. By coincidence, a veterinarian at the Changsha Zoo was attending a conference about endangered tigers at the same hotel. The vet wandered into the turtle conference.

"He said, 'We have a turtle, too, and it's a very big turtle, like the one you are talking about,' " said Yan, the deputy zoo director in Changsha.

E-mails were exchanged. The Wildlife Conservation Society sent two experts to Changsha. "We were very happy because it was a female and had just laid eggs last year," said Lu Shunqing, one of the experts. "That was very good news for the hope of saving this animal."

The discovery of the Changsha turtle was critical. In August, one turtle at the Buddhist temple died. Experts visiting the temple said they could find no evidence that the second existed. Two undisputed giant Yangtze soft-shells remained: the female in Changsha; the male in Suzhou. Neither had commingled with the opposite sex in decades, if ever.

More problematic, neither zoo was willing to let their turtle go.
A pond or the entire Earth

Biodiversity, a linguistic marriage of biology and diversity, describes the variations of life within a particular setting, or ecosystem. That ecosystem could be a single pond or the entire Earth. Implicit is the idea that the ecosystem is sustained by the coexistence and interaction among plants, animals and other life forms.

Few, if any, of the world's modern economic powers, including the United States, have industrialized without taking a dire toll on plants and animals.

In China, the Communist Party's top-down, authoritarian system has presided over a colossal destruction of nature. Now, with environmental problems threatening the economy, the party is trying to engineer a top-down reconstruction of nature.

Environmental construction, a government term of art, is now a priority. Yet the results are not always synonymous with biodiversity.

Since 1998, China has banned the domestic timber trade and launched a nationwide reforestation program. China is now one of the few countries in the world where forest cover is expanding. Yet many scientists say these new forests are more like plantations than habitat.

Often, the new forests include only one or two different tree species and are far inferior to natural forests as incubators for other species.

Unintended results can occur. In Beijing, officials planted millions of "female" poplar trees without realizing that the females produce higher amounts of pollen than do "male" trees. In recent years, workers have had to dig up thousands of the trees as floating springtime pollen often seems as thick as snow.

Restoring animal populations is also complicated. Turtles, which are both revered and consumed in China, were heavily depleted in the wild by pollution and hunting. Traders quickly pushed into Southeast Asia, India and even the United States to meet demand.

"In conservation terms, it became a crisis," said Pritchard, head of the Chelonian Research Institute in Florida. "It was first noticed six or seven years ago. The China market had become packed with turtles not from China."

In fact, Chinese markets teemed with animals, or animal parts, from around the world. Practitioners of traditional Chinese medicine use turtle shells, heads and blood for remedies to cure high blood pressure, tumors, insomnia and other problems. Rhinoceros horns and tiger parts also sold at high prices for medicinal uses.

International outrage has shamed China into banning the trade of rhino horns and tiger parts, but illegal markets are still common.

Turtles, meanwhile, have made a comeback with the emergence of breeding farms. One operation in Guangdong Province produces 100 million turtles every year, many sold as pets. Captive breeding also is now a popular government response for certain endangered species, partly for economic reasons.

But many conservationists worry that too little emphasis is placed on restoring habitat so that animals can be returned to the wild. More than 10,000 Chinese alligators have been bred, but introducing them to the wild has largely failed. Some are now being sold.

Conservationists say environmental policies need to better take biodiversity into account. Reforestation, for example, was largely an effort to stop soil erosion, which contributed to floods, and to stall desertification. The idea of creating a true forest was not a priority.

Meanwhile, economic development still dominates. China's richest source of biodiversity is a "hotspot" in southwestern China along the Nu River designated by Unesco as a World Heritage Site. Even so, provincial officials are trying to build a 13-stage dam through the region. Local officials also have tried to redraw the boundaries for the World Heritage Site in order to create room for mining.

Conservationists are trying to speak the language of economics to build political support for protecting habitat.

Rice demand is growing rapidly, even as farmland is dwindling. For decades, Chinese scientists have used wild rice species to develop hybrids that boost production. Now, development and farming are encroaching on wild rice habitat areas in coastal southern China. "If we let it go unchecked," Lu wrote in a report about biodiversity, "Chinese wild rice will become extinct in fifteen years."
Problems in breeding

Extinction remains a far more immediate possibility for the giant Yangtze soft-shell, also known as the Rafetus swinhoei. In September, the Changsha and Suzhou zoos finally reached a deal. Each agreed that scientists could attempt artificial insemination next spring. Each also signed a contract entitling a certain number of offspring for each zoo - potential stud turtles for future captive breeding programs.

Gerald Kuchling, a herpetologist overseeing the procedure, said success is far from guaranteed. Several years ago, a tortoise in Hawaii died after a similar procedure. In May, Kuchling conducted an ultrasound examination of the ovaries of the female turtle in Changsha. For years, she has laid unfertilized eggs in springtime, though zookeepers say the number has steadily diminished. "The main problem is really to get a viable sperm sample from the old male without harming him in anyway," said Kuchling, who said using small electric shocks is one common method for eliciting a sample. Manual massage is another.

Scientists and nongovernmental groups have played the essential role in trying to perpetuate the species. Government officials have been involved, if somewhat passive.

Under China's system, the Ministry of Agriculture has oversight of the turtle. So far, the ministry has agreed to provide 200,000 yuan, or about $27,000, though none of the money has arrived. Asked for an interview in October, the ministry declined. But faced with scrutiny, ministry officials then contacted the zoos and persuaded them to sign a new deal.

The Changsha turtle will now be transported to Suzhou next year. A special breeding pool is supposed to be built. First, scientists will try artificial insemination. If that fails, the two elderly turtles will give it a go the old-fashioned way. The fate of a species hangs in the balance.