Turtle dreaming: Searching for the Wessel Islands’ marine megafauna

Australia’s Top End, scientists and Indigenous rangers are collaborating to gather knowledge about the region’s large marine animals, which are thought to be in decline. Story and photography by DAVID HANCOCK.

In the warm, shallow waters that lap Australia’s Top End it’s called a “rodeo” manoeuvre; where someone leaps overboard from a boat that’s been following a turtle to grab and hold the marine creature. There is a real knack to catching a turtle this way, according to Kakadu ranger, Dwayne Wauchope.

“You have to get that technique right – where your hands go out automatically and grab him behind the head and tilt him up,” Wau chope says. “You have to make sure your hands are not close to any rocks or coral and you don’t grab him by the shell, because you can cut your hands.”

A ranger at Northern Territory’s Kakadu National Park for more than 20 years, Wauchope says members of his family from the Cobourg Penin sula, 350 kilometres north-east of Darwin, have been catching and harpooning turtles for generations.

“Your parents teach you from an early age,” he says. “Now we have boats and all that other hightech stu , I don’t allow harpooning. If you’re not a really good harpoon person, you can hit the turtle in the lung or elsewhere and if you don’t want the turtle and you let him go, he is likely to die.”

There’s increasing suggestion across northern Australia among Indigenous coastal communities that turtle and dugong populations are declining. At Elcho Island, traditional Yolngu owners have asked hunters to limit their take.

“We still eat turtle and dugong because it is better than food from the store,” says David Gan ambarr, a traditional owner of the Wessel Islands, which stretch north from Elcho into the Arafura Sea. “When we go out and hunt dugong and turtle, we tell everyone they can only take two turtles at one time, and with dugong – only one. If there is a funeral they can take more because we have to feed everyone involved.”

Western science is sympathetic to the concerns of coastal Aboriginal people. Scientists believe climate change, rising sea levels, high temperatures, marine debris, commercial fishing, feral animals and even lights from industrial and residential developments play a growing role in declining numbers of marine megafauna. According to Charles Darwin University marine biologist, Dr Carol Palmer, it’s incorrect to assume – as some do – that the decline is down to traditional hunting.

Based in Darwin, Palmer is heading up an Australian Research Council (ARC) project that brings together land and sea rangers, traditional owners, scientists, universities and government. It’s a landmark partnership that links traditional marine knowledge with Western science. The aim is to establish standardised protocols for monitoring marine megafauna; to identify densities of key dolphin and sea turtle populations by recording sightings and gathering DNA samples; and to identify key habitat areas for conservation management using satellite tracking and traditional knowledge...

For the full story and pictures of Indigenous rangers and CDU researchers looking for marine megafauna in waters around the remote Wessel Islands group, head below to Cosmos 97 | Energy. Effort. Endeavour