Conserving the World's Turtles

Dr. Michael W. Klemens, Director of Conservation and the Turtle Recovery Program at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, is a very busy person. The very future of the chelonians on our planet is his responsibility. He made time in his schedule to speak with me on the phone.

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Diane Levine: How did you become interested in turtles and tortoises?

 

Michael Klemens: That's an easy question! I found a box turtle when I went to camp (in western Pennsylvania) when I was eight years old.

 

Diane Levine: Do you still keep turtles?

 

Michael Klemens: I have one or two turtles which have found their way to me which I use in lectures. But I don't have many pet turtles now. I have a desert tortoise, which was given to me. It was one of those that was going to be euthanized because it had URDS. I nursed it back to health. Someone gave me a pancake tortoise which I find very useful when lecturing about pancake tortoises and their problems.

 

In the past, I kept and bred various species of tortoises and turtles, but these days I devote my energies to trying to save them in the wild. I had leopard tortoises and bred them in captivity. And I had sulcata. They were among the first sulcata to come into the country. They went down to San Antonio to form the nucleus of San Antonio's successful breeding program.

 

So, I have kept quite a few different turtles. I think that was important in developing my interests in turtles and tortoises to this point.

 

Diane Levine: Do you find a conflict between keeping them as pets and trying to conserve them in the wild?

 

Michael Klemens: I don't find a conflict in theory. I think that there are many species of turtles that are abundant enough that one can keep them. I think that by keeping turtles one can hopefully engender the interest in turtles that can be transferred to turtles in the wild and conservation activities. But, I do think that there are excesses on the part of some turtle keepers. I think there are many species that are taken from the wild in numbers that are not sustainable. A lot of species that are kept shouldn't be kept. A lot of people try to justify keeping them under the rubric of captive breeding and doing something for wild turtles, when in fact almost all captive bred turtles never go back to the wild and in most cases aren't fit to go back to the wild.

 

So I'm not against keeping turtles. I think it's a very valuable and a very productive exercise because it can make people concerned about turtles in the wild. I just think it needs to be done more responsibly than it's being done by many people.

 

Diane Levine: How does your work relate to the exhibits of the Museum?

 

Michael Klemens:

People don't realize that the museum has about 200 scientists. It's a major research institution. We, of course, are very much involved in the exhibitions. When they involve turtles, I would be called in. But we have scientists that are doing field work and research around the world. I've always been a turtle specialist and now I've moved very much into taking that science and applying it to conservation. Very recently the museum asked me to expand this not just to turtles but to all other organisms that we deal with.

 

Diane Levine: What are your duties at the American Museum of Natural History? How are they turtle related?

 

Michael Klemens: I am in charge of developing their conservation program which is linking the scientific research which goes on here at the Museum to conservation activities. We are trying to take the science that we do and see how it can be integrated into conservation.

 

One of my major areas is working on the Turtle Recovery Program. It is one of the early projects I started here in conjunction with the IUCN (International Union for the Conservation of Nature) World Conservation Union's global action plan for freshwater turtles and tortoises. I am taking that Action Plan and translating it into conservation reality.

Diane Levine: And what does that mean specifically?

 

Michael Klemens: Specifically, the action plan was presented at the First World Congress of Herpetology at Canterbury, England in 1989. The Action Plan is a list of conservation problems and what needs to be done to address them. But that's all well and good. You can have conservation action plan, but the real challenge is, not just saying what the problems are, but solving the problems. That's what I'm doing. Trying to take those priorities of the Action Plan; find good scientists to do the work; get the projects set up and raise the money to do this conservation.

 

Diane Levine: What are some of the successes of the Action Plan?

 

Michael Klemens: For the last two years we have had 35 projects, funded and operational around the world. We are working closely with other organizations on on-going projects such as the plowshare tortoise in Madagascar and the short-necked swamp tortoise in Australia. We have also initiated some right from the ground up. We just started a project on the pancake tortoise in Tanzania. We are going to be doing a survey of the flat-tailed tortoise in Madagascar. We're funding a project dealing with the studies of the yellow spotted side-neck turtles in South America. We just did the first phase of setting up a second Bolson tortoise sanctuary in Mexico and bog turtles in the northeast US.

 

In the area of political action and lobbying, I wrote two successful proposals for CITES protection for bog turtles and wood turtles which were adopted at the meeting in Kyoto, Japan in March of 1992.

 

Diane Levine: Are there any species of turtles that you have saved by these projects?

 

Michael Klemens: I'm afraid it's not that simple. Turtles live a long time; you can't measure recovery in years. You have to go by decades. We've been successful in getting these projects started.

 

Unfortunately the ultimate success of these projects is not going to become apparent until 50 or 100 years from now.

 

Diane Levine: Have you had any failures?

 

Michael Klemens: The Action Plan lists 81 projects, so every project that I have not been able to start could be considered a failure. Some of them have been stymied by political or bureaucratic problems. Sixteen projects are ready and waiting to go. We just need money for them. You could say if we had been more successful in raising more money we could have had those 16 started already.

 

So it's not really absolute success or absolute failure but it's degrees. You always want to do more than you are able to do and your resources allow you to.

 

Diane Levine: How do you do raise the funds for your projects?

 

Michael Klemens: For example, the New York Turtle and Tortoise Society has helped with volunteer assistance on direct fund raising, but that is very labor intensive. I find the best use of my time is to meet with foundations and larger donors to try to get their support for our projects. Or we try to get our projects integrated into other activities. The American Rivers Foundation had a project in Alabama and I talked to them about expanding this to include the flattened musk turtle, which they did. So there are different ways.

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With ingenuity, hard work and some luck, Michael Klemens and his teams of scientists are "making the world a better place" for chelonians and people too.

 

Originally published in the Tortuga Gazette 28(10): 9, October 1992