Handbook on Marine Turtles of India: Resources, Exploitation and Conservation

Although man now dominates the earth, on the evolutionary time scale he is a newcomer, still in his infancy. If length of residence determined his right to rule, he would have to wait at the end of a very long line of less ambitious creatures. But man, the newcomer, can have a tremendous impact on the destiny of his older neighbors because of his ability to drastically alter the world in which he lives. They have a long past history, which dates back to about 120 million years to the Permian epoch of the Palaeozoic era. Sea turtles represent an ancient and distinctive part of the world’s biological diversity (Ekanayake et al., 2002). Although sea turtles are marine sometimes they are found in brackish water of the estuaries. Within the marine environment, different species of sea turtles occupy different ecological niches. Often the breeding areas are widely separated from the feeding areas (Fugazzatto and Behera, 1999). The present work focuses on just one of these "older neighbors" the endangered marine turtles of India.