Rare turtles go up for sale along with Malaysian retreat

Malacca: For sale: a plain little island, overgrown by shrubs, offering a scrap of beach and sitting in one of the world's busiest sea lanes.

It would be a tough sell for any property agent, but Upeh island in the Strait of Malacca off Malaysia has one precious feature - a nesting site for a rare and endangered turtle.

The good news for conservationists is the Malaysian government wants to buy the island and turn it into a sanctuary for the hawksbill turtle, whose numbers have fallen by 80 per cent in the last 100 years, according to the World Conservation Union.

The bad news is the sale could take years, by which time there may be few of the beak-nosed turtles left.

"Poachers can easily get onto that island and they can get to the turtle nests fast," Lau Min Min, a scientific officer for the World Wide Fund for Nature, said in Malacca, the former colonial fort and trading post. The island lies two miles off Malacca.

Nests

There are only about 15,000 female hawksbill turtles worldwide, according to a 2005 estimate by the US Fish and Wildlife Service. They make about 1,000 nests in Malaysia each year, data from the World Wide Fund for Nature showed.

About a third of the Malaysian nests are around Malacca.

Lau, who has worked on conservation projects along the Malacca coast for three years, said poachers dug eggs out of their sandy nests and sold them to locals who believed they boosted male virility and soothed pregnancy-related ailments.

"From the time of our ancestors, turtle eggs were eaten for good health," said 66-year-old Rokiah Abu Noh, who sells fish caught by her sons at a coastal street market.

She wants the turtle-egg trade to continue and is wary of government plans to buy the island and turn it into a sanctuary.

"The government should be more fair to humans than animals," Rokiah said. "Some of the eggs on the island should be given to our people to sell and eat and some can be saved. That is more fair," she added.