Sipadan Island is one of the few islands in Malaysia where turtles share the reef with humans.
THE arrest of 12 men transporting 19,000 sea-turtle eggs into Sandakan last week is cause for congratulations to the law enforcement process. But it also represents a much larger crime with a staggering economic cost. Twelve men did not collect 19,000 eggs by themselves! This haul required a network of people for collection, transportation, storage and preparation before they were dispatched internationally.
An adult female turtle can lay an average of 80 eggs at a time so this haul represents approximately 240 nestings. Since the eggs cannot have been poached from the well documented (and well protected) popular nesting beaches of Turtle Islands park, they have been taken from the infrequent nestings on more remote beaches and less inhabited islands of which there is a huge number between Malawali (near Kudat) and Sandakan. Conservationists agree that anything more than one nest per kilometre of sandy-coastline is unlikely, so those 240 nests came from 240km of beaches.
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