How one determined scientist joined hands with a 16th century temple in the northeastern Indian state of Assam to save a rare turtle — and started a movement across many such temples to save turtles across the region.
Scientist Jayaditya Purkayastha told Grin the incredible story of his collaboration with the Hayagriva Madhava Temple.
1. Tell us a little about yourself and your background in conservation.
I am basically a researcher in the field of amphibians and reptiles mainly working with snakes, geckos and frogs. I did my PhD on systematic of snake genus Xenocrophis (simply speaking, a group of water snake). My area of interest is herpetology and studying impact of urbanization of biodiversity of cities.
2. How did you come to be involved in this particular turtle and why is it special?
Around early 2011, I visited Hayagriva Madhava Temple and had my first encounter with turtles in its temple pond. Once I was back, I started reading about turtles and learned that turtles are one of the most threatened groups of vertebrates. Then I realized how important it is to help turtles. But, in a state obsessed with rhinos and a country obsessed with tigers (with due respect to both the animals) support and fundings were very hard to come by to conduct a survey in Brahmaputra river system. Thus, I thought of working in temple ponds across Assam with turtle fauna in them as we do not have to invest any time and effort to locate turtles in wild as the ponds from ages are home to the turtles. But since the turtles are kept in the pond on religious grounds, their biological needs are not addressed. Since the periphery of the ponds are concretized, turtles were unable to reach the bank to lay eggs and whenever they could reach the banks, the soil was not ideal for incubation of eggs as in most cases these were clay and turtle lay eggs in riverine silt. Since clay is harder than riverine silt, turtles could not dig deep and laid eggs very near to the surface. Due to exposure to high temperature and worm infestation, most of the eggs got rotten. There we come into action, we started collecting eggs and carrying out incubation in our boxes with mixture of riverine silt and vermiculite as the substrate. We started getting 90% success rate in egg to hatching ratio. We nurture the hatchlings for a period of around six months and release them into the wild (protected areas of Assam). Our main goal is to restock the wild population. Since, Black Softshell is marked as Extinct in the Wild Species, automatically it became our flagship species for the whole initiative.
3. Tell us about the process in which the turtle was rehabilitated and what role did the temple play in the process.
We have identified 16 such temple ponds from Assam with turtles in them and I am sure there are many more such ponds to be found. The temples act as repositories of very rare turtles, such as Black Softshell. Thus, using the present stock of temple pond for captive breeding and subsequent release of hatchlings into the wild, we can do magic and can really stop many species from getting towards the path of extinction. In the whole process, temples will be the key.
4. Why was this particular temple so important in the process and how did this temple come to be involved? Tell a little bit about the history and background of this temple — has it been involved in conservation earlier?
It is not about a single temple, but our flagship temple is Hayagriva Madhava Temple at Hajo as it has the highest diversity of turtles (14 species). Also, there is a person Pranab Malakar, the care taker of the pond who is well versed with turtle management, thus we have better success in that pond. But in actuality all the other such ponds are equally important and we have to create people like Pranab Malakar for each pond if we have to make this project to vibrant and successful.
5. What is your future hope about this turtle?
There are lots of hope and scopes for the turtles of Assam. Assam is home to 20 species out of freshwater turtles and tortoises, out of 28 species found in India. So you see it is great news for Assam in one hand and also puts on our shoulder, lots of responsibility as we also have lots to lose. I, as an individual or we as a small group can only take small steps, but as long as the policy makers do not look beyond big and charismatic mammals, the future of lesser known animals can never be secure. With my limited knowledge, I believe that rhino and tigers are not going to get extinct in near future but many of the turtles and other lesser known animals may really get extinct even before we start knowing about them.
~
