Story at a glance
- Conservationists believed the Burmese roofed turtle was extinct up until 2001.
- A handful of specimens were found and a breeding program was established.
- About 1,000 of the turtles, some hatched from eggs laid in the wild and others bred in captivity, now live at three facilities in Myanmar.
Conservationists are celebrating after a giant Asian river turtle that was once considered to be extinct was brought back from the brink thanks to an ambitious conservation program.
The Burmese roofed turtle has an interesting look.
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The species that lives in the river systems of Myanmar has a bug-eyed face and dons a permanent grin despite nearly vanishing from nature.
In the mid-20th century, the turtle species numbers were depleted due to incidental trapping and fishing, the destruction of nesting habitat and the overharvesting of eggs that prevented the population from replenishing itself.
While Myanmar was largely closed off to the outside world until the 1990s, scientists in the Western world were in the dark about the status of the species. Once the country began to open up, scientists were unable to find any of the Burmese roofed turtles and feared they were extinct.
In 2001, however, Steven G. Platt, a herpetologist at the Wildlife Conservation Society, stumbled upon the shell of a freshly killed roofed turtle on the Dokhtawady River, proof the turtle species was still hanging on.
Around the same time, a living specimen that was purchased in a Chinese wildlife market came into the possession of an American turtle collector, and over the subsequent years, scientists began rediscovering handfuls of surviving animals while on field surveys in the Dokhtawady and upper Chindwin Rivers.
In an effort to replenish the endangered turtle’s populations, the Wildlife Conservation Society and the Turtle Survival Alliance in collaboration with the Myanmar Ministry of Environmental Conservation and Forestry kicked off a conservation stewardship in the early 2000s to collect eggs from wild turtles for a breeding program.
“We came so close to losing them,” Platt told The New York Times. “If we didn’t intervene when we did, this turtle would have just been gone.”
About 1,000 of the turtles, some hatched from eggs laid in the wild and others bred in captivity, now live at three facilities in Myanmar, according to the Times.
A recently released study from Platt and his colleagues has now been able to detail and photograph hatchlings of the species for the first time.
Platt told the Times that while the species is no longer in danger of complete extinction, their full recovery in nature still faces the threat of unsustainable fishing practices.
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