Tourist brochures and adverts for Malaysia always show
pictures of sea turtles. We were going to go to Bali for a few days but ended
up on Tioman Island instead as an erupting volcano caused our flight to be
cancelled.
We found ourselves inside a glossy tourist brochure, staying
in a wooden cabin on a nearly deserted white sand beach but with a pleasant
beach café, which allowed us to take our own wine, a few hundred yards away.
Pulau Tioman is a 2 hour ferry ride off the east coast of Malaysia and when you
visit you understand why it was used as the setting for Bali Hai in the film of
South Pacific; it is a perfect paradise with barely any development.
A longer beach walk brought us to a turtle refuge and we
were invited to see the release of a group (what is the collective noun for
turtles?) that were hatched that morning. Without human supervision their first
trip down the beach is fraught with danger from birds and crabs who enjoy them
as a crunchy snack. They are meant to be very very tasty but no longer on any dinner
menu we can access. Apparently it took ages before a giant turtle was successfully
taken to Europe because the sailors always succumbed to the temptation of
cooking and eating them. Hence in 18th century England diners had to
make do with mock turtle soup.
Those that make it to the sea spend the next few years
swimming hundreds of miles in the deep ocean and getting their own back on the
crabs which they eat, as well as gobbling up jelly fish. As adults they undergo
a complete change of lifestyle and live as herbivores in shallow coastal waters
munching sea grass. We were told that
the females then return to the beach where they were born to lay their eggs but
no one could explain how this is known.
There is an even more extraordinary claim made for the long
fin eels in New Zealand. As adults they have a momentous life decision to make.
They can stay in their creek and live a good comfortable but celibate life
until they die of old age (like the turtles they have a similar life span to us)
or they can swim out to their breeding grounds which are believed to be
somewhere near Tonga and never return. The fantastic claim made is that the
offspring return from the ocean depths and find their way to the family creek.
But where is the evidence? How can anyone know the antecedents of an elver?
Mind you it’s pretty clever to find New Zealand at all from thousands of
kilometres away; Maori didn’t arrive until 13th century but the eels
have been commuting for more than 20 million years!
