In Assam, turtles are breeding again — in temple ponds
The caretaker of a 500-year-old temple in Assam is the man-on-the-ground at the state’s only turtle conservation project.
In 1994, the residents of Hajo, a small town in middle Assam, remember congregating around a rickety old wheelbarrow. Later, as the cart moved around the town, so did the small procession — each person wanting to pay their respects and see Mohan one last time.
Mohan, a 40kg jet-black turtle and resident of the pond that lay next to the town’s Hayagriva Madhava Temple, had died. And everyone, who had grown up around the pond, had a “Mohan story” to tell.
Thirty-five-year-old Pranab Malakar remembers how, as a 10-year-old, he and his friend spent all their free time at the pond, feeding the turtle, and sometimes even sitting on it. “Mohan weighed about 40 kgs — he was enormous, bigger than any other turtle that has ever lived in the pond,” says Malakar.
Black softshell turtles, the species Mohan belonged to, were classified as extinct by the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red list in 2002. In 2004, after 408 of them were found in the pond of the Bayazid Bastami shrine in Bangladesh, the status was changed to “threatened.”
Click the link to read more about how this project all began.
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Photo from Indian Express.
