An Indonesian island commits to safeguarding the world’s biggest turtle

A nearly full moon illuminates a leatherback turtle lumbering from the sea onto a remote beach on Indonesia’s Buru Island, patterning the sand with ridges and grooves that resemble the tread of an oversized construction vehicle.

When she finally stops to dig a nest with her hind flippers, it becomes clear she has suffered a significant injury: One of those flippers is only a healed stub. Toiling fruitlessly, she pauses at intervals, mouth open and panting. A viscous secretion flows from her eyes.

“Oh, poor girl, what did you get into?” Hengky Tasidjawa murmurs, studying the injury. He speculates that a shark or boat may have caused the damage.

Coaxing the massive turtle away from a rock buried in the sand, he gently guides her toward a better location just to the right. “This is a good place,” he says softly. Then Tasidjawa begins to work in tandem with the turtle’s functional back flipper. He uses the full curve of his arm to drag sand out of the hollow until it’s large enough to contain dozens of eggs.

At one time, Tasidjawa was the most prolific poacher in his village. On nights like these, when up to a dozen leatherbacks emerged from the water to lay eggs, he’d harvest half of each clutch. After collecting between 1,000 and 1,500 eggs, he’d sell them. He poached nesting turtles for a shorter period, too, drying the meat to sell on a neighboring island.

Now he’s a steadfast steward of the very same animals. Since 2016, the father of two has been working as an enumerator for a community-based surveillance group called POKMASWAS. He is trained to monitor and protect this Critically Endangered subpopulation of leatherbacks on Buru Island in eastern Indonesia’s Maluku province.

That work is making a big difference. Since WWF and the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) began funding leatherback monitoring here in 2017, local communities have reduced egg poaching from about 60% to virtually zero—a staggering achievement when meaningful progress is typically measured in decades.

What’s more, like Tasidjawa, most locals have no cultural or spiritual ties to leatherbacks. They choose to help protect the species because of their increased awareness of how dangerously imperiled this population is—and how Buru’s nesting beaches can help with their survival.

“Employing former poachers as enumerators has been a big win; they work seven days a week to patrol nesting beaches,” says Mike Osmond, senior program officer for WWF’s Oceans program. “It’s thanks to their commitment to wildlife that we’re now seeing a remarkable reduction in poaching in a relatively short period of time.”

While all leatherback sea turtle populations are at risk, this population has declined by 80% since the 1980s, with bycatch (accidental capture of turtles during fishing) as a major driver as well as decades of illegal egg and meat harvesting—and their numbers continue to decline.

When Western Pacific leatherbacks migrate to and from foraging grounds in US waters, they are at particularly high risk of injuries and drowning from entanglement in commercial longline fisheries, including US fleets off the coast of Hawai’i. The same can happen on a much smaller scale in Indonesia, where local fishers sometimes use gillnets, a long wall of netting that can entangle leatherbacks.

Since Western Pacific leatherbacks spend a notable amount of time in both Indonesia and US waters, both nations share responsibility to protect them. That’s why NOAA works with international partners to change the trajectory of the critically endangered species.

Accordingly, the US formalized leatherback protections with the Endangered Species and Magnuson-Stevens acts. Under these laws, NOAA established regulations for certain fisheries to minimize encounters with leatherbacks, including safe handling and release guidelines and gear changes that minimize bycatch. Some fisheries also have a cap on the number of allowable interactions with the species per calendar year. For example, after 16 such events, Hawai’i-based shallow-set longline fisheries must shutter immediately for the remainder of the calendar year, which creates the potential for economic loss.

Across the Pacific, local fishers disentangling leatherbacks from gillnets can damage or break their gear. WWF and the Marine and Fisheries Department of Maluku Province, where Buru Island is situated, collaborated on a program that replaces broken gear at no cost, encouraging fishers to safely release turtles caught in their nets.

Though NOAA has been working on leatherback conservation at both ends of the Pacific Ocean for 30-plus years, until the last decade, the organization was unaware of a nearly nine-mile-long nesting beach on Buru Island—a site with the potential to boost overall leatherback turtle population numbers and change the odds of the species’ survival.

In 1990, Indonesia passed regulations that protect the six sea turtle species that swim in its waters, along with other marine animals. But the practicality of enforcing federal law across the country is complicated by the fact that Indonesia is an archipelago of more than 17,000 islands spanning a distance wider than the continental United States.

Beginning in 2018, WWF-Indonesia worked with regional and local governments to develop regulations against poaching leatherback eggs and nesting females. The nesting beaches are close to the city of Namlea, a bustling port where the Fisheries Department of Buru Regency sits, vastly improving communication.

“It feels like only from the kitchen to the living room,” says Ufaira bin Thahir, head of the Buru District Fisheries Agency. She’s in frequent contact with village leaders and WWF’s Dafa Athallah—who are all about a 90-minute drive from one another.

This collaboration, along with seeing community members take pride in protecting leatherbacks, contributes to bin Thahir’s sense of fulfillment. It wasn’t so long ago that she traveled to the villages to see a leatherback.

“I knew it from a book first,” she says. “But seeing one for the first time was extraordinary.”

And this dedication and leadership from local leaders like bin Thahir has carried through to the federal level; Buru and the Kei Islands have been included as priority locations in Indonesia’s National Plan of Action for Sea Turtles from 2024 to 2029. Alignment between local and national strategies means local governments have greater access to funding, support, and other resources necessary for implementing conservation effectively.

Building on those efforts, the Indonesian government officially established a 142,000-acre marine protected area in the waters surrounding Buru Island last November. “This conservation area supports the protection of Buru’s leatherback turtles, and we are committed to delivering real protection on the ground,” says Erawan Asikin, the head of Maluku Province’s Ministry of Marine Affairs and Fisheries.