Members of the Las Cuevas Eco-Friendly Association are appealing for funding from the private sector, public sector, government, and/or members of the public, to enable them to continue patrolling the Las Cuevas and Maracas beaches. They said no funding has been received for the last six years.
President Arlene Williams said the group, which formed in 2010, monitors and tags sea turtles on Las Cuevas Beach nightly during the turtle nesting period from March 1 to August 31.
“A lot of times we’d walk down the beach and see turtle carcasses, because people poach them to feed their families, and we saw the importance of protecting the turtles. We started with 12 people, mainly women, and then when the word went out about what we were doing, we were contacted by Turtle Village Trust, who is the umbrella body for all the turtle organisations, and they trained us, showing us how to tag, how to take the data, what to do when the turtles come in.
[caption id="attachment_1010123" align="alignnone" width="1024"] Bags of garbage collected during a cleanup of the Las Cuevas Beach on March 5. - LAS CUEVAS ECO-FRIENDLY ASSOCIATION[/caption]
“Right now we’re down to five members, as four died, and of those, only two people actually patrol the beaches because we’re not funded anymore.
"We used to get a stipend of $250 per night from the Green Fund, who would fund the Turtle Village Trust, who would then hire us to work, but it’s been six years now we haven’t gotten any funding and we’re doing this strictly voluntarily because of the love of turtles. There’s less poaching when we’re patrolling the beaches.”
Williams said she did not know the reason why the funding had been stopped, as there was a great need to protect the turtles who are critically endangered. She said the group had approached various organisations for funding and advertised on social media with no success.
“We don’t have all the equipment we need to carry out the tagging, tracking and monitoring the turtles. We actually got sponsored some batteries recently and that is how we were able to go out and patrol, because the equipment needs batteries. We’re not working and we need batteries, and batteries aren’t cheap, it’s terrible.
“We need headlights, we have one headlight, and we have to cover a beach almost two miles long. We need headlights, batteries, gloves, funding, umbrellas because rainy season will be coming in sometime and we don’t even have a structure to say if the rain comes we can go under it or anything like that.”
She said turtles were tagged so that an account could be kept of how many turtles came to the Caribbean, and Trinidad and Tobago specifically.
“When we tag the turtles we put two flipper tags on them, one on the left and one on the right and we also put a microchip in them. We’re not able to monitor where they go after they’re tagged. We’re just there to know that, if they come back, we get the tag number and can say this turtle came last year and in years before. And we’re able to say whether they’re declining or not.”
