Review : Voyage of the Turtle: In Pursuit of the Earth's Last Dinosaur

Carl Safina’s mellifluous prose evokes the beauty and mystery of the sea and its ancient denizen, the Leatherback turtle


Voyage Of The Turtle: In Pursuit Of The Earth's Last Dinosaur
by Carl Safina
Published by Henry Holt and Co.; 1st edition (May 30, 2006)
Rs 689 on Flipkart

Carl Safina is a marine scientist and the founder of the Blue Ocean Institute. This is his third book after the much acclaimed and award winning Song for the Blue Ocean: Encounters Along the World's Coasts and Beneath the Seas and Eye of the Albatross: Visions of Hope and Survival.


Safina starts his travels in Trinidad where this noble giant,  survivor of more than 100 years of evolution, is giving birth on a dark beach, and then takes us on a trip through Florida, South Carolina, Cape Breton Islands in the ice-cold waters off the Canadian coast, Malaysia, Costa Rica, Mexico and finally New Guinea – all the remaining (and sadly former) habitats of the Leatherback Turtle (Dermochelys coriacea). In the course of his travels he meets scientists, law enforcers, poachers turned conservationists, resort owners, fishing boat captains and gives us an intimate view into the life and biology of this beautiful creature – in the ocean, on land, at the moment of its first swim and washed up carcasses. What results is a compelling, passionate but honest account of the species and the mesh of attitudes, laws (or their absence), threats (including destructive fishing techniques that have depleted the oceans) and research that may eventually pull it back from the brink.


The book is full of facts and data that can come from intimate contact and close study alone. For instance, the Leatherback is the only turtle that, after laying almost seven dozen billiard-ball-sized eggs, lays another two dozen embryo-less eggs on top, their purpose yet unknown. It is conjectured that they may play a role in providing air-space on the top of the nest, stabilize humidity or protect against fungal infection.


In another place Safina writes about the failure of the initial TEDs (turtle exclusion devices) since the opening size allowed only the juveniles to escape and it took years to enforce a larger opening by law. Or, for instance, that well into the 1990s, the Japanese imported turtle shells – 30,000 kg of it (amounting to almost 30,000 adult Hawksbill turtles harvested annually) to be carved into hair ornaments for ladies – a craft called bekko.


Through his travels Safina cites several cases that underscore how difficult (and counter-intuitive) it can be to formulate a sustainable and effective conservation strategy. For example, in Malaysia, the Leatherback population has plummeted from 10 to 15 thousand adult females and 3,000 annual nesters in the 1950s to virtually zero today. For 50 years almost every egg was taken and when finally artificial incubation was tried out wrong temperature control produced either all females or sterile intersex individuals. 


In Florida, beachfront high-rises and luxury condos that adhere to a strict night-time “light curfew" offer a safe backdrop for hatchlings crawling towards the sea. The open beaches close to the towns disorient them, the hatchlings mistaking the light-polluted land horizon for the real one. Having evolved on Earth where for millions of years the horizon is the brightest pre-dawn area, for the turtles such disorientation means almost certain death. Clearly, there is no substitute for accurate scientific knowledge, more often than not gained painstakingly on the field. Romantic greenhearts take note. Throughout the book Safina succeeds in seamlessly relating the plight of the species to the larger issues and threats that plague the oceans and touches upon the other surviving sea turtles as well – the Green Sea Turtle (Chelonia mydas), Hawksbill (Eretmochelys imbricata), Flatback (Natator depressus), Loggerhead (Caretta caretta), Kemp's Ridley (Lepidochelys kempii) and Olive Ridley (Lepidochelys olivacea).


Safina’s prose is mellifluous and evokes the beauty and mystery of the sea. One of the most poignant passages in the book, just after he has described the newly hatched Leatherbacks on their first swim, full of life and oblivious to the threats that await them every single moment of their lives, summarizes the moment of extinction, “The end of a species comes as tranquilly as this gentle sunrise. There’s no final struggle, no valorous last stand or terminal flourish. Just one final puff of breath, then mere absence. No creature mourns its own passing. The grief and the consequence lie solely with us, but few feel the loss.”


The book is one of the finest on natural history I have read and a must-read. It is guaranteed to make you fall in love with the oceans and their denizens especially the large brooding  vagabonds of the blue – the Leatherback.


Reviewed by Sahastrarashmi

Book Review: Life's Grandeur by Stephen Jay Gould

Eminently readable, Stephen Jay Gould's Life's Grandeur is a must for anyone who wants to understand Darwin better

Stephen Jay Gould (Sep 10, 1941 – May 20, 2002) is one of the best known and most influential writers on the Theory of Evolution. The author of more than two dozen books on the subject, the scientist is also known for his theory of Punctuated Equilibrium (with Niles Eldredge).

“Life’s Grandeur - the spread of excellence from Plato to Darwin” (Vintage, 1996, current printing 2005) is a compelling and eminently readable account of one of Gould’s favorite themes -- the process of Natural Evolution, which is fundamentally random and tracks the environment. Any attempt to see a trend whether by increase in size, complexity or progress on any other parameter is a statistical illusion. A quote from the second chapter sets the tone for most of the later discussions. Gould states “If we are but a tiny twig on the floridly arborescent bush of life, and if our twig branched of just a geological moment ago, then perhaps we are not a predictable result of an inherently progressive process (the vaunted trend to progress in life’s history); perhaps we are, whatever our glories and accomplishments, a momentary cosmic accident that would never arise again if the tree of life could be replanted from seed and regrown under similar conditions” (Life’s Grandeur – The spread of excellence from Plato to Darwin, Vintage 1997, pg 18)

Freud famously observed that every major revolution has done its bit to dethrone man from its self-appointed cosmic status, noting three such revolutions: first, the Copernican, which displaced Earth from the centre of the universe; the second was the Darwinian thesis that uprooted our notion of man in the mirror image of God (and almost finished off God in the process); and the third was the Freudian revolution that displaced our claim of being rational beings by the discovery of the vast dungeons of the unconscious. To this, Gould adds a fourth – the discovery by geologists and paleontologists (incidentally his own trade) that not only is Earth at least 4 billion years old, but human history, going by the fossil record, is a mere blip in time. 

Faced with these facts men, egocentric and arrogant as they are, have been trying to subvert the evolutionary saga to bring in a progressive bias. Faced with the fact that we are restricted to “the last sliver of earthly time”, men have constantly been trying to show evolution in the light of series of steps leading to themselves, a last ditch effort to regain our sense of universal importance. 

Gould’s objections to the Progressionist agenda are rooted in the nature of evolutionary theory itself. After a brief discussion of the nature of natural selection, he proceeds to call out the fallacies of the Progressionist argument with a vigorous attack on the pillars sustaining it,  viz. an anthropomorphic reading of evolutionary trends (mainly by giving undue importance to later arrivals on the evolutionary scene), extrapolating from trends that either do not exist at all or are at best freak short-term phenomena, and a linear view of evolution resulting in a mistaken and simplistic notion of a species replacing  another often in increasing order of an identified evolutionary trend.

His objection, then, is that we are forcing patterns by first selecting attributes that suit us best and then reading the trend in a manner that completely ignores the fact that the given trend is present in a tiny tail of the “Full House” (the complete assembly of species on the earth) and this minuscule sample hardly qualifies as representative of life. In other words braininess as being the exquisite preserve of mammals, which represent but a tiny fraction of total species on earth, a trend that culminates in mammals, is a gross misrepresentation of the facts of life. Most organisms have not bothered about being brainy since it does not suit their way of life (it is not a criterion for success via natural selection in their environment) and they are doing fine anyway. You might as well say that humans are the best navel-gazers and then place them at a pedestal but then most life does not bother with navel-gazing. It does not matter to them and they still proliferate. If one were to ask them they might want to use different attributes -- for instance, nose lengths in the case of elephants, streamlined bodies in the case of fishes, and echolocation in the case of bats.

Gould is eminently readable and well informed. He draws upon examples from personal life (his battle with cancer), baseball (the book includes a primer for English readers) and fieldwork. He is also a skilled artist of metaphors – The Drunkard’s Walk being one. Throughout the book Gould argues persuasively about how  random history (Evolution) can mislead one into believing that certain trends exist and then certain people then try to cease upon these to generalize, even call evolution progressive. 

The book’s epilogue touches on Social Progress (as opposed to evolutionary progress) and there Gould springs a surprise. Like most of his output this book is indispensable for anyone trying to make sense of Darwin’s theory and its various shades.

Review by Sahastrarashmi

Photograph of S J Gould by Kathy Chapman (Wikimedia Commons)

Book Review: The Goan Jungle Book

Hidden Pleasures

THE GOAN JUNGLE BOOK

BY NIRMAL KULKARNI

HERPACTIVE PUBLICATIONS

INR 300

This book could have used the services of an editor and inept printing has muddied many photographs. That said, it warmed my heart to read it. These illustrated essays on Goa's wildlife, though by no means styled after Peter Matthiessen or even Madhaviah Krishnan, are the spoils of a gallant indie effort. At the very least, the book might inspire tourists to more than ogle and tank up.

Despite hundreds of square kilometres of seashore, rainforest and undulating coastal plain, Goa has received scant attention for its wildlife. Few field guides exist, and websites promoting ecotourism are enterprises of brazen skulduggery. Yet, wildlife enthusiasts flock in search of hornbills, flying snakes and rare tree-frogs. Kulkarni's intimate knowledge of the region's biodiversity motivated his attempt to fill the void. A commercial artist and photographer smitten with things that walk, fly or creep, he has initiated several conservation efforts, though most have escaped media attention since they do not involve charismatic megafauna such as tigers and elephants. 

The book unpretentiously escorts us into the leech-plagued, moss-girded forests of the barely explored Mahdei Wildlife Sanctuary, the Eden that Kulkarni despairs to protect. To see the creatures in his menagerie, you just have to look underfoot. Or peek into a bush. His protagonists are squirrels and wild boar, shieldtails and tarantulas. There are charming notes, told with childlike enthusiasm, on nest-building weaver ants and those little-known legless amphibians, the caecilians. He laments how Goans still stalk monsoon swamps to catch bullfrogs for the pot and how flying foxes were until recently hunted by village quacks. Tip for your next Goa vacation: Dump the beaches, unless you're looking for turtles.

- BIJOY VENUGOPAL

This review appears in the August issue of Outlook Traveller. Stop gawking and go buy the magazine!

Though I do not know Nirmal Kulkarni personally, I am aware that he blogs at Goa Wildwatch. To buy the book, write to him