Tim Chan, Taiwan Environmental Information Association
In the past 10 years, Taiwan's freshwater turtles have encountered an unprecedented existential crisis, in which the issue of snake-eating turtle poaching and smuggling has become the focus of attention, but another species with a worse situation, the chai coffin turtle, is often ignored. The conservation dilemma of the wood coffin turtle is related to its ecological habits and distribution characteristics, the low-altitude hilly or terrace environment distributed by the existing population, in addition to the shallow waters with aquatic plants, the frequency of using the land environment is also very high, but such an environment and human activities are highly overlapped, it is very easy to be subject to illegal hunting, and the habitat is often damaged due to changes or development of land use forms, and it is not easy to carry out effective protection measures for specific habitats.
The fate of this turtle is as unknown as its title of "Chai Coffin Turtle" or "Red Rice Turtle". The name of red rice should be related to Chinese herbal medicine, and it is used as a special mark to replace the genuine turtle board, and the early Taiwan Chinese medicinal materials used almost red rice turtle board. In the past, there were many "single winter fields" in the mountains where rice and grains were rotated, and the paddy fields that were re-turned over and irrigated were the favorite of the chai coffin turtle, but because the newly planted seedlings would float up after being climbed, the chai coffin turtles that ran to the field to feed and move were not popular, and they were often moved, and some would be used to feed the sows as nutritional supplements.
Although the chai coffin turtle always smiles, the fate of the wild population is bumpy and full of uncertain futures.
Juveniles of the wood-coffin turtle. Image credit: Skink Chen (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
<h1>The victim of the MLM
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The chai coffin turtle has no special economic value, its fertility is not bad, and it is not difficult to keep. Being selected as a target for market speculation was once considered a crazy move: there is no final market demand, the threshold for breeding and breeding is not high, just like rats will be "pyramid schemes" in the closed turtle market. And after the speculation is powerless, the price of the turtle plummeted, but it is packaged with the name of the "stone money turtle", the price and market demand are like washing three warm, and soaring; but the use of "words" pyramid schemes always have to face the market test, after breeding 8 million small stone money turtles a year, the turtle price has plummeted, and it should not go back. The model of fried turtle success after earning huge profits is of course "a return to rationality and normal market mechanism"! But even when the market crashes, poached and smuggled turtles can't return to their original habitat.
The stone turtle that is highly hyped on the other side is not actually Taiwan's chai coffin turtle, but the larger and lighter body color of the "South Stone Turtle" distributed in southern China, Hainan and northern Vietnam; the chai coffin turtle from Taiwan is classified as the "North Stone Turtle" with a large blue head. However, because whether it is the southern stone turtle, the northern stone turtle, the big blue head, the small blue head or the Japanese Yaeyama stone turtle, after polyculture and breeding, they are all similar, so with the huge profits, they are poached and smuggled, and none of them are spared.
Taobao can find the sale of stone money turtles. The image is taken from Taobao.
For speculators who use words to manipulate market supply and demand and speculation prices, using the same model, from stones, calligraphy and paintings, wood, red coral, plants, animals, etc., as long as they are rare and topical, they can become the target of speculation. The price can not be speculated, and then the conversion of the target continues to speculate; but it is innocent wild animals that have fallen. In particular, the moderately endangered snake-eating turtle and the chai coffin turtle, a little less and not too few species, are the best targets for speculation; like the spotted turtle, Chinese turtle or golden turtle, the number of artificial breeding is large, can not operate the market supply and demand, can not be speculated at all; too rare and high-priced species, there is no market speculation space.
<h1>Once the whole island is under threat to the chai coffin turtle in Taiwan</h1>
Many early Taiwanese literature often described the chai coffin turtle as an island-wide distribution, but no wild population was found in the south, and sporadic individuals should be abandoned, escaped or released individuals. Records of the Japanese occupation period are relatively small in number compared with the common spotted turtles in the flat land environment. In the hilly or terrace environment in the north-central and eastern regions, due to the water needs of farming and people's livelihood, many aquatic and coastal plants are densely planted with water storage ponds and ditches, which is an excellent habitat for the chai coffin turtle.
Scattered with many aquatic and shore-growing plants, the pond is an excellent habitat for the chai coffin turtle. Image source: Profile screen.
However, with the rapid change of land and agricultural utilization patterns, the road system is densely cut, the area of pit ponds is rapidly reduced, and in order to maintain and manage conveniently, vertical cement embankments replace the original earthen embankments, and environmental conditions are deteriorating. Unlike the common spotted turtle in Taiwan, the chai coffin turtle, which is sensitive to environmental disturbances, continues to retreat to the mountainous areas with less human interference.
Although it can now be seen that the wood coffin turtle and the spotted turtle inhabit the same water environment, there is still a moderate distinction in the use of habitats; in many environments, the degree of cementation of artificial modification, less water depth changes and diverse shore plants, forcing their habitat height overlap, but also led to another unexpected threat - interspecific hybridization, the hybridization of the wood coffin turtle and the spotted turtle is often found in the highly modified water environment.
<h1>Amphibian characteristics Atypical aquatic freshwater turtles</h1>
The chai coffin turtle is not a typical aquatic freshwater turtle, preferring shallow water environments with dense aquatic plants to open deep waters. Less use of the sun on the shore to regulate body temperature, more use of sediment, fell wood, humus soil, plant roots formed by the temperature gradient to maintain body temperature. In winter, they also use shore plants or underverted trees, or even to the bottom of adjacent forests or ravines, buried in the soil or leaf piles to survive the winter, while wild spotted turtles do not have the habit of crossing the winter.
The wood coffin turtle has the habit of migrating and wintering. Image source: Tim Chan.
Because of the unstable water source in shallow waters, the wood coffin turtle often migrates between different water environments, using ditches, temporary water accumulation or directly across the land environment, sometimes moving more than 1 km. Earthworms or terrestrial insects can also be found in the stomach of the coffin turtle , suggesting that they also feed on terrestrial environments.
Juvenile turtles have limited mobility and are easily preyed upon by other animals, making use of shallow water environments that are relatively safe and stable in water sources; female turtles also lay eggs near stable waters suitable for young turtles. The use of radio tracking methods also found that female and male turtles will return to ponds with more stable water sources in April and May each year, and have a high degree of loyalty; of the 10 individuals tracked, 9 return to the original pool every other year; it should be related to the choice of breeding and spawning in safe and stable locations.
Spawning chai coffin turtles. Image source: Tim Chan.
In the wild, the population density of the wood coffin turtle is not high, rarely exceeding 50, and it moves in different water environments in many cycles, rarely staying in the same place for a long time. The farther away the environment in the adjacent usable waters, the longer it stays in the terrestrial environment and the farther it travels. However, the closer the suitable habitat distribution distance, with a movement channel and a springboard concatenation, the smaller the range of activity and the shorter the stay in the terrestrial environment.
<h1>Difficult or not difficult childcare issues</h1>
The distribution range of the wood coffin turtle is highly overlapping with human activities and is highly susceptible to poaching, and its habitat is easily destroyed and disappeared by the shallow water environment with dense aquatic and coastal vegetation. The land habitat used for winter crossing and migration is often overlooked. The ecological habits of amphibians have caused them to become regular visitors to road killing. Many ethnic groups often disappear completely within a few years of the completion of new or widened roads in the vicinity.
The wood-coffin turtle, whose range overlaps with human activities and is under hunting pressure, is like a belly-to-back predator. Image source: Tim Chan.
As long as the threat of illegal poaching can be lifted, the use of artificial means to assist ethnic reconstruction is not difficult. In addition to the market hype demand on the other side, which leads to serious poaching pressure, the actual demand for exploitation is limited. At present, the current situation of the wild population of The Chai Coffin Turtle in Taiwan is worse than that of the snake-eating turtle; but because the market demand for the Chai Coffin Turtle Farm is close to full, and the snake-eating turtle breeding is moving towards large-scale and large-scale development, its market demand is not easy to be met, and it will be an endless disaster.
Don't expect commercially bred chai coffin turtles to be of any help to the reconstruction of wild populations, as recent studies have found that taiwan's populations are clearly differentiated from Chinese mainland, and should be treated with different management units if they are to be reared. To reduce the impact of the original habitat change, it is necessary to start from the creation of habitat, and it should not be a model of thinking about land and water separation and single habitat. It may not seem difficult to improve the current tragic situation, but it will take time, a safe and suitable habitat, and a willingness on the part of the authorities to promise them a promising future.
In the past, the red rice turtle was used as a substitute for genuine Su plate (golden turtle board) in the Chinese medicine market, and it would be hyped as the name of the fake stone money turtle, and the soaring value was also used to mix with the Southern Stone Turtle and was poached and smuggled. The disorderly market operation mode of speculating turtles for huge profits is regarded as a model for helping small farmers get rid of poverty and get rich, and it is also a pipe for black money bleaching through turtle cooperatives, and it is also a "model" of cooperation between industry and government; the result of typical rat pyramid schemes is that after breeding tens of millions of stone turtles, it is still unclear where the final market demand is? The process of using the market hype of pyramid schemes, the unlimited plundering of wild animals and plants, and the transformation of regional wild turtle resources seems absurd, but it has happened repeatedly; but the rapid disappearance of Taiwan's wild population of chai coffin turtles is a fact that must be faced.
However, at present, the poaching threat of the chai coffin turtle is more serious than that of the snake-eating turtle, and its habitat is mostly in the private land area that is highly used by humans, but there are similar conservation success cases abroad. However, there has been no forward-looking and holistic conservation strategy, and many issues or species have just been ignored or ignored, and the chai coffin turtle is just one of them.
※ The author of this article, Chen Tianxi, is an assistant professor at the Wildlife Conservation Institute of Pingtung University of Science and Technology in Taiwan, and the article is reproduced from Chen Tianxi's Facebook.