More than 1.1 million sea turtles have been killed illegally in the past 30 years, according to a study relayed by The Guardian Friday, September 9.
According to scientists at Arizona State University in the United States, despite laws to protect them, nearly 44,000 turtles have been killed and illegally exploited each year for the past decade. Numbers “really high”is alarmed Jesse Senko, one of the authors of the study, but “almost certainly underestimated by several orders of magnitude, because it is simply very difficult to assess any type of illegal activity”.
The researchers arrived at these numbers by examining “over 209 peer-reviewed journal articles, archived media reports, questionnaires and reports from conservation organizations”precise The Guardian.
Sea turtles, the newspaper recalls, are poached “for food, for use in traditional medicine and to be sold as artifacts, decorations or jewelry”.