Jaguars Ripped My Flesh

by Tim Cahill

  It was not, all in all, a very pleasant hour. When one of the ABC cameramen expressed some disgust with the carnage, a young Mexican biologist who spoke fluent English blistered him with an eloquent torrent of words. She was a plump, darkly attractive woman wearing very thick glasses. Mexico, she said, is a poor country. These turtles are a natural resource. They graze on their own, in the sea, at no expense to the people, and return every year for the slaughter. She and the other biologists would help set quotas so the turtles would survive, even prosper. “But you don’t want us to harvest these animals,” she said. “Then what will we eat?”

  She referred not only to the twelve pounds of meat recovered from each turtle, but also to the money made by the fishermen, by the people who worked in the slaughterhouse, and by those who fashioned the turtle leather. Even the bones of the slaughtered animals were left to dry, then ground into fertilizer. “Why don’t you go back to your own country,” she concluded bitterly, “and film your own turtles?” Her eyes glittered angrily behind her glasses.

  Monday we went to see the lab. It was a sterile, newly constructed building only half a mile north of the slaughterhouse. I counted ninety-six small sea-water tanks containing about two hundred hatchlings apiece, and ten larger tanks holding five hundred hatchlings apiece. About twenty-five thousand turtles in all, exactly the same size as the ones we had seen at Escobilla, and all, I was told, hatched at the lab.

  We couldn’t find a biologist in charge, but the workers said the hatchlings would be kept a week or two, maybe three, then released at sea, beyond the breakers. At Escobilla, I had seen the surf pound in and watched as the tiny hatchlings had been tumbled back onto the sand for hours. I had seen some eaten by crabs and was told that certain fish massed beyond the breakers and fed on the hatchlings as they swam out to sea. The turtles in the lab would be spared many of the usual causes of infant mortality.

  On the beach, in front of the lab, there were eggs buried in the sand, and these were penned to discourage such predators as dogs and coyotes. In another area I saw a large, open-sided building containing hundreds of the styrofoam boxes. Each was filled with sand and held over one hundred eggs. There were two kinds of eggs buried in the sand and contained in the boxes: those laid naturally and taken from the beach at Escobilla and those taken from the oviducts of slaughtered females.

  Two large tanks, containing mature males and females, had been constructed for the study of mating behavior.

  A plaque on the front of the main building said that the lab was dedicated to the preservation and study of the turtles and that it was built by the government, by the fishing unions—called co-operativas—and by private enterprise. That last meant PIOSA—Pesquera Industrial Oaxaqueña Sociedad Anónima—and Antonio Suárez. PIOSA had put up most of the money for the lab. Even Juan José admitted that. The lab seemed a perfect example of enlightened self-interest.

  It wasn’t until much later that night that certain things began bothering me. Some of the men working at the lab were the same men I had seen collecting turtles at Escobilla for that unspecified “scientific” purpose. Many of the men working at the lab were the same men I had seen gutting turtles at the slaughterhouse the day before. They all wore the same green T-shirts and shorts.

  We had come to the lab unannounced. When we got there the men were taking the hatchlings out of the tanks and putting them in the boxes. We asked why. The tanks, we were told, were dirty, and since the pipes weren’t working, they had to be emptied, cleaned, and filled with new sea water. This made sense. Except … looking back on it, not one of the tanks was refilled until it became apparent to the workers that we meant to stay for some time.

  It was Monday. The governor and the officials had left. Was it possible that the turtles we saw—the ones supposedly hatched at the lab—had been brought in from Escobilla? For a day? For the governor’s visit and the dedication? No, it hardly seemed possible. I was thinking like Juan José.

  Still, it seemed worth another visit to the lab.

  Slaughterhouse cove is a shove-off point for the turtle fishermen. They leave in shifts, two men to a thirty-foot skiff powered by a forty-horsepower Johnson outboard. It is a forty-minute run north to Escobilla, and, during nesting season, when the females are massing a mile out for the arribazón, there are turtles everywhere, as far as the eye can see. As many as a hundred animals may be contained in an area the size of a city block.

  Like all reptiles, the Pacific Ridley is dependent on external stimuli to regulate its body temperature. Primarily vegetarians, they feed on sea grasses in the early morning, then pull to the surface to bask in the warmth of the sun. As their body temperature rises, metabolic activity increases, digestion occurs more rapidly, and the stomach is emptied in preparation for another meal. When basking, the turtles are very nearly somnambulant. And easy prey.

  I watched as a fisherman grabbed the loose end of a long rope tied to the gunwale of the boat and plunged into the water, a foot and a half behind a turtle. He grabbed the top of the shell with one hand and pushed down on the back of the shell with the other, forcing the animals head and front flippers out of the water. Quickly, he slipped a noose over one flipper. His partner grabbed the rope at the gunwale and pulled the animal to him, heaving it up into the boat and flipping it onto its back.

  Fishing this way, I was told, a two-man team can catch twenty-five turtles in an hour and make two runs a day. There are a score of boats working on the best days.

  The fishing itself seemed almost too easy. Certainly it was a good deal easier than in previous years, the fishermen told me, when turtling had been banned during the nesting season and the animals could only be found far out at sea. Now they were massing for their own slaughter, and many more were being killed—killed during nesting season, in most cases, before the females could lay their eggs. Still, as a high official in the Mexican Department of Fisheries pointed out, the new lab was putting so many new hatchlings into the sea that, in effect, “less were being killed.”

  I spent some time diving with the Mexicans. The turtles, I found, were virtually harmless when approached from the rear. They made no effort to escape or dive until literally touched. I came on them like the Mexican divers and rode them along the surface for several yards. The leather on the back of the neck felt surprisingly “dry,” like the skin of a snake or lizard that you always expect to be slimy. Their faces, even while basking, had a pinched, disapproving cast and their mouths were turned down, like a child’s drawing of a scowling person. They seemed unimaginably ancient.

  I was joined, during one dive, by half a dozen dolphins. They frolicked, undulated beside me as I swam. The turtles, by comparison, seemed joyless, dreary beasts, altogether too intent on brute survival. I thought of them as the constipated accountants of evolution, and was, in turn, thoroughly and contemptuously ignored by them. On one occasion, diving with a fleeing turtle, a dolphin actually buzzed the slower animal in a silly, playful manner. We—the dolphin and I—were the mammals: fast, giddy, intelligent. In evolutionary terms we were children teasing our elders.

  An unsettling thing happened when we returned to slaughterhouse cove after the first day of diving. The manager of the slaughterhouse asked us all to leave, and he threatened force if we didn’t. Why had they been so anxious to have us film the dedication on Sunday, but wanted us out of there on Tuesday? Looking back on it, I should have connected it with our visit to the lab on Monday, and my misgivings about what I had seen.

  Back at the hotel, Jack Ford and I talked about our dive over a beer. Ford had happened upon a pair of copulating turtles, and had a story to tell.

  The male species is the worst sort of opportunist. Knowing, instinctively, that the females must mass for nesting, he lies in wait. Intercourse takes place in the water. The male secures himself to the top of the female’s shell with two curved nails, each located on the inside of a front flipper. Turtles have five fingers, and that curved claw, located about halfway up the appendage,
corresponds to our thumb.

  Having nailed himself on at the top, the male curves his longer, heavier tail under the female’s shell. The penis is housed in the tail and extruded from the anus.

  “They weren’t moving,” Ford said, “they just sort of wallowed there in the swells. They really didn’t look like they were having any fun. I watched them for about forty minutes, but they may have been connected for hours.…”

  “They’re turtles,” I said, “they do everything slowly.”

  “When the male pulled out,” Ford said, “I got a look at his equipment.” Jack spread his hands the full width of his chest, then described the diameter of a baseball with the thumb and forefinger of both hands. “They are very well-equipped animals,” he said.

  Local fishermen are equally impressed, and their stories of bizarre copulatory feats among Pacific Ridleys bugger the imagination. It is thought that sperm is stored in the female’s genital tract and can continue to fertilize eggs for years, and that a nesting female may mate several times a day on the way to a nesting site. A female crawling onto the beach may exhibit scratches on the neck and her shell may be broken near the head where the male has held her.

  But it is the size of the male equipment and the long copulatory periods that the fishermen expand upon. And this has led to the myth that eating turtle eggs is good for the human male. The eggs are said to put lead in the old pencil.

  In Spanish, eggs are huevos, and egg poachers are called hueveros. Poaching is a crime, and the hueveros of Escobilla were not delighted with the idea of an interview. I had rented a Volkswagen bus and a driver in the town of Pochutla and was trying my luck at the cañtinas along the highway near the beach. No one, at three cañtinas, believed that people actually poached eggs. They asked where I had ever heard of such a thing. A surprising number of people I talked to didn’t even live in the area. Some citizens expressed great amazement when told that less than two miles from where they sat, turtles occasionally came up on the beach by the thousands.

  My driver for the day, a slick young Mexican with shiny hair and a mustache, lost his patience after a few hours. In his capacity as a public driver, he said sadly, he had sometimes picked people who he believed might have been carrying eggs. He had seen one such man walking on the highway, and, if I wished, he would drive back and ask him if he wanted to talk. The young man in question wore a straw hat with an extravagantly folded brim and a shirt which was cut off below the pectorals to reveal an elaborately muscled brown stomach. For fifty pesos he agreed to talk for an hour.

  The man, whom I’ll call Alfredo, said he had already heard that a gringo was asking questions. He chose to ride on the floor of the van and directed us onto a dead-end road shielded by rows of corn.

  Alfredo said that a number of local people poach eggs, but that the hueveros are not organized as such. On a moonless night people just seem to gather at the Escobilla bridge; and, after much discussion, about ten are chosen to work that night. They split up into pairs and walk through the jungle, off the trail, finally crawling up over the cactus dunes. One man lies in the dunes, near the cover of the jungle. The other creeps out onto the beach.

  Even on moonless nights, the star glow on sand and sea makes it light enough to work. Poking into the sand with a sharp stick, the huevero feels, more than hears, a muffled pop when he hits the first egg in a nest. Digging with his hands, he empties the nest of its hundred or so eggs, filling a small sack that he takes to the man in the dunes, who places them in a large sack.

  If the soldiers come—you can usually see them flashing a light—the man in the dunes fades into the jungle with the large sack. The huevero on the beach drops his small sack and runs for the jungle at top speed. The soldiers wear boots and carry heavy rifles. The odds are pretty good that the huevero will make the jungle.

  Working this way, two men can steal as many as eight thousand eggs in one night. Eighty nests. His share of the take, four thousand eggs, Alfredo could sell to a driver for fifteen hundred pesos, about seventy-five dollars. He was chosen to go to the beach four times a year, tops. His poaching income came to three hundred dollars in the best of years. His annual income from growing corn, Alfredo said, was five hundred dollars. He was responsible for a family of ten, and the temptation to steal eggs was very great.

  Alfredo was not proud of night work. He wanted me to know that many of his eggs were given to the poorest families, to widows, for instance, with starving children. In the past, Alfredo said, when there was a drought like this year, hungry people could go down to the beach and the soldiers would let them dig up a limited number of eggs to eat. Now, PIOSA was killing all the turtles and the soldiers would not let starving people dig for eggs. Everyone, Alfredo said, knew that the turtles would soon be gone. He had lived near Escobilla all his life, and he thought he had a right to earn some money from the eggs before PIOSA killed all the turtles.

  Later, over beer and mescal at a cañtina far from Escobilla, I talked with my driver. He wanted me to understand that he had never done such a thing, but that he had heard how the business worked. A driver with a legitimate load makes a space and caches forty thousand eggs or more. There are checkpoints along the major highways, so egg smuggling is a sweaty affair. In Acapulco or Mexico City the eggs are sold under cover of darkness to a man in the marketplace. The driver can make as much as two pesos per egg, so a single forty-thousand-egg load can bring a driver about four thousand dollars, tops.

  In the more cosmopolitan cities, a turtle egg sold in a restaurant can cost as much as nine pesos. The eggs are said to be somewhat oily and they are often served fried, five or six at a time, and covered in chili sauce to mask the taste. Sometimes eggs are served raw, in the shell. The top is peeled off, a squeeze of lime is added, and the entire mess is dumped into the mouth. The eggs are eaten primarily by wealthy and ignorant men who cannot sustain an erection.

  The second visit to the lab was a revelation. All the tanks were empty. There were no hatchlings. There was no sea water. Nothing.

  The large tanks outside, containing the mature turtles, were empty. One misshapen adult female lay on her back, dead beside the tank. She had been left there to bake in her own shell.

  Ten styrofoam boxes, like the ones we had seen at Escobilla, were stacked by the side of the building, apparently forgotten. There were two hundred hatchlings in each box and all were dead or dying.

  The only person at the lab, an old man eating his lunch under a tree, explained that all the hatchlings had been dumped at sea. As for the styrofoam boxes, somebody must have forgotten them after they brought the hatchlings in from the beach at Escobilla on Saturday, the day before the dedication. Sure, he said, it would be okay if Juan Jośe put the hatchlings out to sea. Somebody had just forgotten to do it. The mature adults, the man said, had been taken to the slaughterhouse.

  That night I apologized to Juan Jośe de la Vega.

  Had all twenty-five thousand hatchlings been brought in from Escobilla? To impress the officials and the governor? To put on a sideshow for the Mexican TV cameras and the Mexican people?

  Hunting was now allowed during nesting season, and if officials at the Department of Fisheries can be taken at their word, it was this lab that they expected to compensate for the carnage. But it was apparent that the lab wasn’t functional.

  Even if the lab were functional, a good argument can be made that it might have been worse than useless; that some projects would yield an incredibly poor rate of return and that others might actually contribute to the extirpation of the species. From reading, I had learned that there were similar labs all over the world, and some interesting work has been done at them. For instance, there was the matter of burying eggs taken from the oviducts of slaughtered females: experiments conducted on Green Sea turtles, with similar nesting habits, showed a 14 percent hatch rate among replanted eggs from slaughtered females, compared with a 63 percent rate in eggs from undisturbed nests. More to the point, Juan José had opened ten boxes at
the lab and examined ten eggs, all from slaughtered females. In all cases the yolks had turned milky and had begun to disintegrate. Few, if any, eggs from the slaughtered females would ever hatch.

  As for dumping the hatchlings at sea, the authorities are divided, but according to Dr. Archie Carr, one of the world’s foremost herpetologists, it may be a useless endeavor. The struggles of the first day may be an integral part of the life cycle. Hatchlings in tanks may become pen happy and find themselves unable to feed at sea. Dumping could put the hatchlings in an unnatural current. Finally, whatever mechanism it is that tells females to return to the beach of their birth must surely be implanted at birth. It is quite possible, even probable, that none of those twenty-five thousand dumped hatchlings would ever see the beach at Escobilla.

  Time was running out for the ABC crew. Their original concept—one hundred thousand turtles on the beach—was scrapped in favor of good footage of at least one turtle laying her eggs in the sand. Walking the beach each dawn, I was able to count an average of twelve new tracks and nests a night. Twelve nests, separated by four miles of beach and twelve hours of darkness. Even with a wooden sled towed by a burro and several hired men to carry equipment, the crew was very lucky to get good nesting film. As it happened, the turtle that was finally filmed came up onto the beach no more than four hundred yards from our campsite.

  She arrived unseen, riding a breaker, then crawled over a strip of wet sand and up the gently sloping beach. Adapted to sea life, she moved laboriously on land. Her flippers were spread out to their full extent on the sand, and they made awkward semicircular patterns in the sand as she dragged the weight of her body the forty or so yards she needed to get above the tide line.