Sea turtles and their eggs were considered such a delicacy in the 1700s that traders would travel to a remote atoll in the middle of the Indian Ocean to gather great numbers of the reptiles and ship them to far-flung soup bowls in Paris and England. The culinary trend was so popular that the Seychelles government was purportedly giving out licenses in the early 1900s for the take of 12,000 green sea turtles on Aldabra Atoll, a large atoll roughly 1,120 kilometers from the nation’s capital, Victoria.
“Turtles and in particular turtle soup was a delicacy for the higher echelons of the British Empire in particular,” says Adam Pritchard, a conservation biologist with the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom.
More than a century of harvest had an extreme impact on the population, so much so that by the 1960s the beaches of Aldabra were only seeing roughly 2,000 egg clutches per year. Since green sea turtle females typically lay between three to five clutches of eggs in a given mating season, researchers estimated only about 500 green sea turtles were nesting on Aldabra’s beaches at that time.
