Life On Planet Earth
A mock-documentary transcript
Your inner voice is now the voice of David Attenborough with his same smooth tones and candor.
The Earth’s ocean is home to some of the most spectacular species on our planet, with beauty and mystique in abundance. Estimates put our oceans home to hundreds of thousands if not millions of different species, including bacteria and microbes, with up to 2,000 new species discovered every year.
The humble loggerhead sea turtle carries the biodiversity of the ocean on its shell. Colonies of small animals and plants such as algae, barnacles and crabs find habitats on the shells of loggerhead turtles, with up to 100 species having been found on the one turtle. They are a bastion of biodiversity and environmentalism in their niche. They keep the ocean floor in a delicate balance as they prey on hard-shelled animals, recycling vital nutrients through their excrement back onto the ocean floor as a calcium source for other animals. This marvelous specimen is known as a keystone species with other animals in the ecosystem relying on it for their own survival.
In their adult life, the turtles are carnivorous, seeking out crabs, conchs and whelks to consume with the aid of their strong jaws and large head. They are also known to eat jellyfish, shrimp and fish.
While the loggerhead turtle is large in size, the adult male generally weighing 110kg, they are masters at maneuvering in the water. Their front flippers are powerful, propelling them through the water with their back legs acting as steering and balance tools. They need to be masters at traversing Earth’s expansive oceans, being a migratory species that travels hundreds of miles to reach inland water bodies, coastal and subtropical areas for their preferred habitats and breeding grounds.
Despite the females laying several clutches of over 100 eggs each per breeding season, the loggerhead turtle is now marked as a vulnerable species. As the turtles migrate through the ocean, they do not see the ship on the horizon carrying the greatest predator of the planet.
Humans.
As the ship nears, a great trawling net scoops through the ocean like a sieve, catching all the wildlife and draining the ocean of its biodiversity. While the turtle’s flippers are powerful, they are unable to escape the trawling nets, caught in the mass of marine flesh, scales, flippers, fins and shells.
This particular ship is a shrimp trawler manned by humans who have installed a turtle excluder device, but the turtle has become disoriented and is unable to navigate the trap to escape back through the mouth of the net. The turtle has suffered its fate as bycatch and, unable to surface for air in the next 30 minutes, it drowns.
If the turtle had been able to use the turtle excluding device, it would have died due to human impact regardless. This turtle ate plastic just off the coast of Mexico two days ago, mistaking it for jellyfish. The plastic bag has blocked its intestines leaving it unable to eat and eventually, starve.
The turtles from its egg clutches will suffer a similar fate, hunted purposefully by the human race for their meat and skin, swallowing sharp plastics that will rupture their internal organs, or being caught in abandoned nets in the ocean leaving it unable to escape predators.
As humankind’s impact on the earth increases and climate change worsens, the temperatures of the sand nursing the turtle eggs causes an imbalance in the genders of turtles hatching, crippling the vulnerable species reproduction efforts.
Alas, loggerhead turtles are providers not only to the species that treat their shells as a home and to the wildlife that eat their recycled nutrients from the ocean floors, but they are also providers to their predators.
Such is the way of the natural world.
References:
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/reptiles/facts/loggerhead-sea-turtle
https://www.worldwildlife.org/stories/what-do-sea-turtles-eat-unfortunately-plastic-bags
https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/content/documents/Ocean_Factsheet_Biodiversity.pdf
https://www.seeturtles.org/sea-turtle-diet
https://www.worldwildlife.org/species/loggerhead-turtle
About the Creator
Eloise Robertson
I pull my ideas randomly out of thin air and they materialise on a page. Some may call me a magician.
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