Lang Tengah Turtle Watch

After Founder, Hayati Mokhtar, sought help from friends, WWF conservation specialists and Terengganu state government officials, the Lang Tengah Turtle Watch was born. With enthusiastic interest from local Malaysian volunteers and students from the Universities of Cambridge, Birmingham and University College London, by April 2013 the project was underway. Since the project began it has grown steadily; to date saving over 79,403 turtle eggs from being sold to the market and hosting in excess of 606 volunteers from 23 different nationalities.

维护我们的嵌套的人口的关键turtles – predominantly Green Turtles – on Lang Tengah relies on constant and continued presence on the island, as this is the main deterrent to egg poachers. Living 24 hours a day in the camp, we regularly patrol the nesting beaches on the island by night, relocating any nests that are laid on other beaches back to the safety of Turtle Beach. Our patrols are hardly run-of-the-mill, unless you consider fireflies, phosphorescence, copious amounts of shooting stars, distant lightning and ancient creatures hauling themselves out of the sea as ordinary things to encounter.

At our core is our turtle project but in 2018 we are expanding our operations from the shore, right down into the ocean. Having already compiled a list of the island’s terrestrial fauna, we are now embarking upon marine research projects to see how we can better understand how to improve the health of this ecosystem. This will encompass looking at fish, coral and invertebrate abundance and diversity.

As far as biological research on Lang Tengah is concerned, the records of the marine park and WWF up until LTTW started work were described as ‘data deficient’. Our initiatives on the island are helping fill-in the blanks for both terrestrial and marine species found along this east-coast archipelago – and our preliminary studies have already turned up some interesting results.