Ecuador’s Indigenous Cofán show how to have your turtle and eat it too

At the end of the 1980s, the Indigenous Cofán community of Zábalo, inside Ecuador’s Cuyabeno Wildlife Reserve, was alarmed by what was happening on the banks of the Aguarico River. Like in all the other tributaries of the Amazon, heavy hunting of yellow-spotted Amazon river turtles (Podocnemis unifilis) and harvesting of their eggs was causing a dramatic decline in their population. The freshwater turtles that had historically fed the nearby villages and that used to be abundant were disappearing.

“We used to walk along the river on the different beaches picking eggs. Indigenous peoples, colonizers and all the groups of people that were there would pick turtles and eat them,” says Felipe Borman, originally from Zábalo and a member of the Cofán Survival Fund (FSC), an organization dedicated to the conservation of this Indigenous people’s culture and of the rainforest where they live. “We don’t have the exact numbers on how it was before, but the elders say there used to be a lot of yellow-spotted Amazon river turtles and that, if you went down the Aguarico, the turtles were there, as many as stones.”

“We know that since humans have been in the area, with the building of their communities, turtles declined,” Borman says. Sometime in the late ’80s, in the egg harvest season, between August and January, they found only 180 turtle nests. That was the moment the community of Zábalo grew concerned and decided to take action.

The idea the locals had was to take responsibility for the impacts and change the vision they held as a community of the species. The first action to protect them, in 1989, was to self-impose a full consumption ban.

“The first year they didn’t eat them, but they saw there were not as many positive effects because the nests were still vulnerable,” Borman says. “The community of Zábalo wasn’t eating the eggs, but other communities who walked along the river did, as did the natural predators in the beaches. Then they said, ‘We need to protect them more.’” Borman has been working and living with yellow-spotted Amazon river turtles nearly his entire life, since he was a child.

The second action that the town of Zábalo took, in 1991, was to move the nests to higher beaches so that people wouldn’t raid them and so that they wouldn’t be affected by the river swelling. The first trials resulted in the release of more than 200 turtle hatchlings. Little by little, the families started experimenting and improving their work with the species. Between 1994 and 1995, they saw 990 turtles hatch, and they even started to receive the first economic incentives from NGOs to build the first artificial beaches and pools next to Cofán houses to rear the young turtles before returning them to nature.

That was the start of a strategy that involved a full community and organizations and institutions that, throughout the next two decades, saw more than 100,000 yellow-spotted Amazon river turtles hatch in their territory, according to data from the team of locals and experts from WWF, the Cofán Survival Fund and Ecuador’s National Institute of Biodiversity (INABIO).

Their hatching methods have improved to the point where 81% of eggs hatch successfully. In late 2023, a study by the community and a group of scientists was published in the Latin American Journal of Herpetology detailing their accomplishments.

Rescuing turtles

Turtles in the genus Podocnemis are known as South American river turtles, and are found in the Amazon and Magdalena basins. Two of the species found in Ecuador, the yellow-spotted Amazon turtle and the Arrau turtle (Podocnemis expansa) are classified as vulnerable and critically endangered, respectively, on Ecuador’s Red List, mostly due to the excessive and constant consumption of eggs and meat by local communities along the nesting beaches in the region. Both species are also listed in Appendix II of CITES, the wildlife trade convention, meaning their international trade is closely controlled.

“Yellow-spotted Amazon turtles are indispensable for the ecosystem as they help us to keep balance in aquatic ecosystems, in seed dispersal and nutrient recycling by moving the riverbed to bury themselves and the riverside to make their nests,” says Jéssica Pacheco, a researcher with WWF’s Forests and Freshwater Program and a co-author of the 2023 study. “In addition, they are a source of protein for the local communities that live on the shores of Amazonian rivers.”

Borman, also a co-author of the study, describes the two turtle species as very peculiar animals that sunbathe on the beaches every now and then. “Yellow-spotted Amazon turtles are a flatter creature, not as round as the land turtles. They are black with spots on their head. When they grow, they weigh 5 to 10 kilos [11 to 22 pounds] and lay between 15 and 45 eggs [in a reproductive cycle].”

The capture and trade of these species isn’t a recent issue, Borman says. There are records dating from the 16th century of conquistadors hunting the turtles for their meat and oil. Nowadays, the exploitation of these animals extends throughout the Amazon region, including Ecuador, Colombia, Bolivia, Brazil, Peru, Venezuela and Guyana, countries where the animals are prized for their dietary, medicinal and ornamental uses.

“Lately, we also have the full effect of climate change affecting rivers, and that impacts the locations where turtles lay eggs. The beaches are getting too hot. In addition, rivers swell at different times now, and as turtles live there, they are very vulnerable,” Borman says.

The project in Zábalo, the River Turtles Community Management Program, involves many actors and the participation of local families to monitor the species.

“The entire community is involved in the project and we all play our part. First, we have regulations to protect yellow-spotted Amazon turtles. We also invest our own money for this project … to do the monitoring every season,” Borman says. That money comes from the state’s program Socio Bosque program, in which the community receives funding in exchange for committing voluntarily to conserving native forests and their ecological value. “The families in the community split the different days of the week and, every day, they organize themselves in teams of six to eight families,” Borman says.

Every morning the groups go to the beaches before dawn. They comb their assigned locations, looking for footprints of yellow-spotted Amazon turtles that have left the water to lay their eggs in the sand.

“Where the turtles dig, you can see the area has a design that is a bit different. First, you make the decision as a family about whether you are going to harvest the nest or put a mark on it — with a stick and a tag with your name — to save it for the project. For example, if that week I didn’t have food at home, I would harvest the eggs to eat them,” Borman says.

Everything depends on the number of nests they identify. For example, if a family detects six to eight nests, they may harvest half of them and mark the rest for conservation. Then the community monitor’s work continues. Monitors are hired to check the entire area and record the work of the families.

“Generally, the monitor goes up the river between 7 and 8 in the morning and asks how many nests you harvested and how many you marked. That’s how we keep control,” Borman says.

The monitor is also tasked with reviewing each nest to see if it’s in a risk area. If that’s the case, they carefully move the eggs to a bucket filled with sand, making sure that the position and order of each egg is the same as in the nest. They then take them to the artificial beaches and recreate the nest there, note down the rest of the information — like the collection data and number of eggs — and protect the new site for the following 60 days until the eggs hatch.

“There are some nests that are well-placed on a high beach, where nothing is going to affect them for a few days; the monitor leaves those for around a week so that the eggs get harder and have a better hatching chance than when they are handled so fast. But in the end, all the nests are taken to the artificial beaches to hatch,” Borman says.

In Zábalo, members of the Cofán community count the number of yellow-spotted Amazon turtles before releasing them on the banks of the Aguarico River. Image courtesy of Michelle Vela/INABIO.

“That’s how we’ve seen the yellow-spotted turtles grow and start to lay their eggs on the beaches. Little by little, we also saw the number of nests in our area increase, as well as in the neighboring areas, where they also saw an increase,” Borman says.

The evaluation

While the success of the strategy has long been evident, there was a need to expand the information since the monitoring and validation processes had been limited in the past. That’s why the Cofán Survival Fund and the community of Zábalo, together with researchers from WWF and INABIO carried out a comprehensive evaluation of the River Turtles Community Management Program.

The goal was to have the scientific support to prove the advances in the almost three decades of work, strengthen the management plan, contribute to the conservation of turtles, and have the tools to achieve a sustainable commercial plan that allocates a percentage of the turtles for their trade to generate revenue to strengthen the project and the Cofán families.

“The Cofán have had quite representative success extracting the eggs and managing them artificially,” says Mario Yánez, a researcher with INABIO who specializes in the taxonomy, phylogenetics, evolution and ecology of Ecuadorian amphibians and reptiles. “This has directly resulted in an increase in the population of yellow-spotted Amazon river turtles in the area and also in an opportunity. They managed a resource for a long time and it’s currently stable to potentially extract quotas of these turtles and have a potential [commercial] business.”

However, Yánez says this is an issue that’s hard to discuss with environmental authorities, as they’re too rigid in the vision they have for the management of the species. According to Yánez, their methodology proposes captive breeding of turtles in a farm or nursery to produce the eggs.

“On the other hand, the use that the Cofán people want to make is the same as in other areas in the world and neotropical areas. It’s what is known as rancheo: having a natural area where the animal resource can be extracted and used with quotas and, above all, understanding that there must be closed seasons,” Yánez says. “This rancheo depends directly on having a recovered and healthy ecosystem. Cuyabeno is a protected area of fauna production where this can happen. The Cofán have the support for their work.”

The Zábalo community and its more than 20 kilometers (12 miles) of river are located in the area that was used for the evaluation. The information the Cofán collected came during their daytime patrols in the breeding season, from September to February every year between 1994 and 2019. The available data were standardized and unified in a database. The evaluation considered the population trends in turtle nesting, including density, abundance, hatching success and baby production for yellow-spotted Amazon river turtles, while for Arrau turtles they only collected some available data since this species wasn’t the focus of the community program.

“With the knowledge they have of their geography, the first thing was to establish a delimitation of the geographic area to measure the different variables of the study,” says study co-author Santiago Varela, a biologist and research assistant with WWF and INABIO.

“We measured the surface of each of the 21 beaches that the Cofán own inside the wildlife production area, in the Cuyabeno reserve, known as one of the most biodiverse [areas] in Ecuador.”

That’s how a total of 9,126 nests were reported in the Zábalo community along the Aguarico river in 17 years, for an average of 537 nests per year. Annually, 56% were assigned to conservation and 36% were for local consumption, while 8% were lost due to natural causes — like predation and river swelling — or human causes, such as theft by people from outside the project.

They calculated the hatching success based on the nests with complete information — those correctly tagged with the date and number of eggs — to reach an average success rate of 81.35%.

“In Zábalo there are more yellow-spotted Amazon turtles than in any other community,” says Rafael Yunda, a study co-author and researcher with WWF’s forests and freshwater program, who has worked with the Cofán on the project since the beginning. “It started with 180 nests and now there are more than 1,000 in this area alone, not counting the ones that go to neighboring communities. We know that there are other communities that have followed our example because they have seen that it works.”

The study points to different management programs in the Amazon region that, like the one in Zábalo, have been successful in the recovery of yellow-spotted Amazon turtles. In Pacaya-Samiria National Reserve in Peru, for instance, the first experiments started in 1978 and evolved into a participatory management program in 1994. This project resulted in the rapid growth of the local turtle population and the attainment of a management patent under a regime of no harmful extraction. Commercial trade in eggs and adult turtles in Pacaya-Samiria started in 2008, with the initial quota increasing gradually under technical criteria.

In Zábalo, in addition to the decrease in turtle consumption, the success in the increase of nests and egg hatching has compensated for the natural factors that affect the survival and success of nests, like predation and floods.

Hope

The Zábalo project has been so successful that the River Turtles Community Management Program has been expanded to assist other towns in the Ecuadorian Amazon replicate their methodology and act as a bridge connecting these communities to various outside organizations.

“Evaluating these successful trends allows not only academia but also the communities to improve the turtle management strategies,” Varela says. “Throughout the Ecuadorian Amazon there are initiatives to manage these animals, and this study allows the effort of one community to be useful for the rest.”

For Felipe Borman, seeing the achievements of the community has been truly inspiring. The goal now is to help boost the economic benefit to families from their conservation actions.

“I grew up with the project, like all kids in Zábalo. We learned how it worked and participated as a community in the tagging of the nests and the releases. We were educated like this, it’s a part of our life,” Borman says. “Now we have to fight to guarantee a revenue for people. Nowadays, the organizations tell us that we are going to teach people about conservation and environmental education because our project is a tool to ensure abundance in the future.”

Banner image: Yellow-spotted Amazon turtles (Podocnemis unifilis) released in the Aguarico River in Ecuador. Image courtesy of María José Torres/WWF Ecuador.

This story was reported by Mongabay’s Latam team and first published here on our Latam site on Feb. 26, 2024.

Citation:

Varela, S., Vela-Torres, M., Borman, F., Yánez-Muñoz, M., Borman, R., Yunda, R., … Pacheco, J. (2023). Assessment of a community management program of river turtles (Podocnemididae: Podocnemis) in Zábalo, Ecuadorian Amazon. Revista Latinoamericana de Herpetología, 6(4), e633-81. doi:10.22201/fc.25942158e.2023.4.633