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.” Young yellow-spotted Amazon river turtles (Podocnemis unifilis) heading into the waters of the Aguarico River for the first time. Image courtesy María José Torres/WWF Ecuador. “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.…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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