‘Remarkable’ freshwater turtles face quiet decline

Uh, so Van, let's dig deeper onto that.

What's actually happening? You mentioned some damage to them.

What's actually happened to the turtle populations in Australia right now?

So most of them are in decline by varying degrees.

So in some places we're down to 10% of what we used to have, or 20%.

Some places are not so bad off.

But the other important thing is that this isn't just Australia, this is a global trend.

So most species of freshwater turtles are declining from a range of different threats.

So in Australia we've got things like foxes eating their nests, pigs too eating their nests.

So we've got these invasive predators that didn't used to be here.

We have direct persecution.

So they used to be considered pest species in some of Australia, and so they were, there were a- actually bounties for them for a long time.

We have them getting hit on roads by cars, we have them getting hit by boats, things like that.

And we also have a lot of the river systems just being altered to varying degrees, which is impacting them on ways that we, we don't really understand very well just yet.

So why is this not as prevalent and noticed in society, and why are people not noticing that, that this is happening then?

Yeah, so probably if you go to ask somebody about turtles, your average person on the street, a lot of them will talk about sea turtles.

They're the ones that are in the public eye.

They're the ones that most people tend to know about.

If people talk about freshwater turtles, it's probably gonna be limited, most of the time, to the turtles that they see crossing the roads, or they might have a wetland that they walk around sometimes and they see turtles basking.

Or they might be- go fishing sometimes and catch a turtle, uh, by accident, which happens quite frequently.

And in those circumstances, if you're seeing turtles on kind of a regular basis, you might just assume that this is normal, and, you know, these are the normal numbers of turtles that we should be used to seeing.

But in the old days there were a lot more.

So you might be seeing 10 times more in some places than that.

And so it's just that I think people are either not aware of them as much as they could be, or if they are aware of them, they're just kind of used to the situation we have right now.

So Michael, you've obviously been studying turtles for a while.