As if decimating rainforests isn鈥檛 bad enough, now it turns out industrial logging is also preventing leatherback turtles from nesting.
There is a timber boom in central Africa, with logging now allowed in two-thirds of Gabon鈥檚 rainforests. Felled logs are floated down rivers to the coast in their thousands, where they are packaged for shipping abroad. Some are lost in transit, though, and float out to sea, eventually washing up along Gabon鈥檚 1000-kilometre coastline. Those beached logs pose a threat to breeding turtles, says William Laurance of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama.
鈥淚t鈥檚 surprisingly easy for turtles to get tangled in the logs,鈥� he says. Laurance鈥檚 team found logs thwarted 8 to 14 per cent of nesting attempts on the crucial nesting beach at Pongara, Gabon (, DOI: 10.1017/S0030605308006625).
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Laurance thinks that legislation changes could improve the situation. 鈥淭echnically, Gabon鈥檚 government owns washed-up logs and it鈥檚 prohibited to remove them.鈥� The Gabon government could encourage the removal of timber outside the nesting season, he says, but that needs supervision, as using tractors to drag logs away could do serious damage to the beach.
Endangered species 鈥� Learn more about the conservation battle in our comprehensive special report.
