ABSTRACT
Marine turtles are cold-blooded reptiles slow moving on land, but in the water they glide effortlessly. Using their forelimbs for thrust and rear limbs as a rudder, they navigate seasonal winds and crisscrossed currents to take themselves thousands of kilometers across oceans. Like their distant cousin the crocodile, they move between the land and the water. But unlike their cousin, their time on land is generally restricted to the sandy beaches where mature female turtles go to lay their eggs. Invariably, it is on the beaches where they first entered the ocean as hatchlings that female green turtles return to lumber up the beach and excavate a nesting pit to lay their clutch of eggs. In their only vaguely parental gesture they brush sand over the newly laid eggs before trudging back to the sea. For the next two to three months the females stay in nearby shallow waters feeding,
mating and returning every two or so weeks to lay further clutches. Under the right conditions, the eggs hatch. At peril from predators from sky and sea, dozens of tiny hatchlings scuttle into the water and head into the open ocean. There they will spend the “lost years,” ten to twenty years foraging and growing in the open ocean before returning to coastal zones to feed, mate and nest, continuing the cycle that has taken place for millennia. In the Torres Strait, due to seasonal winds and the ocean currents that surge through this
narrow passage, marine turtles and Islanders have been a part of each other’s existence for a very long time. Of the seven identified species of sea turtle in the world, six are known to either breed or migrate through the Torres Strait, and Islanders chart their seasonal movements. As the winds of Sager (the Southeasterly trade winds), transition to Naigai (the doldrums), mature turtles return to the region to mate. The period of mating is known to Islanders as surlal or surwal. By Kuki (the early NW monsoons) hundreds of hatchlings are taking to the ocean. The relationship Islanders have with marine turtles can also be measured through archae-
ological evidence, which has provided chronologies of human occupation of the region along with insights into environmental changes and subsistence practices.1 Archaeological
investigations on the western island of Mabuiag and on the Mer islands in the east have shown the longevity of Islanders’ reliance on marine resources. At an excavation site at Dabangai, a settlement on the north east coast of Mabuaig associated with the Goemulgaw clan, occupation involving marine based subsistence was dated to the mid-Holocene period ranging 7180-4960 cal BP.2 While in the eastern Torres Strait the archaeological examination of marine and terrestrial faunal use by Islanders at two sites on Dauar, found the use of turtle coincided with the occupation of the islands 2600 cal BP.3
