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263 The Mittags sold the turtle farm to the Cayman Islands government in 1983. The farm continued to sell turtle meat to local restaurants and expanded the Mittags’ head-starting program, releasing surplus hatchlings and yearlings to restore green turtles to the Caribbean and as a popular tourist activity. The Cayman Islands and UK governments sought approval to export green turtle products under CITES several times in the ensuing years but never gained sufficient support. Prospects for approval appeared best after a delegation of congressmen from the United States toured the farm and agreed to hold a hearing on the issue of turtle farming and ranching. The Fish and Wildlife Service proposed a change to the special rules to allow exports through the United States. The regulations were withdrawn, however, after the UK effort to register the farm as a captive breeding facility for long-maturing species failed at the CITES conference in Gaborone, Botswana, in 1983. In subsequent years, employees of the Cayman Turtle Farm observed green turtles mating in waters offshore of the farm and females nesting on Grand Cayman’s Seven Mile Beach. All were identified by a living tag devised by John and Lupe Hendrickson and applied to the yearlings prior to their release. These observations were reported in the Marine Turtle Newsletter, which continues to be published by volunteer editors from the sea turtle research community and celebrated its 100th edition in 2002. Waves generated by Hurricane Michelle in November 2001 inundated the breeding lagoon and rearing tanks at the farm, releasing thousands of green turtles, including three-quarters of the breeding herd, to the sea. The facility was rebuilt further inland, expanded, and reconfigured as a nature park, offering visitors an opportunity to swim with the turtles in an artificial reef lagoon. The small turtle farms on nine of the Torres Strait islands continued for a few more years, but government funding ended in 1980 when it epilogue Supply and Demand 264 The Case of the Green Turtle grew increasingly difficult to find fish for the hungry turtles and to keep them free of disease and parasites. Barney and Judith Nietschmann visited the Torres Strait Islands in 1976 to continue their ethnographic and ecological studies of traditional maritime cultures. Barney studied the hunting and ecology of dugongs and green turtles and their role in the Torres Strait society and economy. When the Nietschmanns toured several islands, they saw signs of the former farm project, but it was not a topic of general conversation. In 2004, the IUCN Marine Turtle Specialist Group, whose members now numbered in hundreds, classified green turtles for the Red Data Book as endangered globally. The recommendation was based on evidence of a 48 to 65 percent decline in the number of mature females over the past century and a half at thirty-two index nesting sites, as required by the IUCN’s new quantitative criteria for classifications. The index sites included the nesting beaches at Tortuguero, Raine Island on the Great Barrier Reef, and Telang Telang Besar, on Sarawak’s Turtle Islands. Nesting colonies on Sarawak’s islands are protected by a Wild Life Protection Ordinance prohibiting the taking of all marine turtles and their eggs. The Sarawak Museum ’s Turtle Board coordinates research and operates conservation hatcheries on the islands, which are included in the Talang-Satang National Park. In a project Tom Harrisson would have enjoyed, the Turtle Board has placed approximately 500 reef balls on the seabed around the islands to deter illegal trawling, enhance tourism diving, and provide shelter for resting turtles. The Sarawak Forest Service’s marine department is establishing farms to produce soft-shelled terrapins for the export market. Because all the turtle farms and ranches either closed or changed their function, the question was never resolved whether turtle mariculture would trigger an increase in poaching of wild turtle populations or would flood the market and thus reduce pressure on wild populations. The issue was moot once the taste for turtle soup and the demand for turtle products declined. Coastal tourism became a global industry and recreational diving and snorkeling brought people in contact with marine turtles in the wild. In 1986, Clem Tisdell at the University of Queensland published the only economic analysis ever done on the question; he concluded that the impact of farming on the level of wild harvesting could be “small or of zero magnitude.”1 Its effect depended on the elasticity of supply of turtles in the wild. In...

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