Indigenous ‘turtle women’ help vulnerable reptiles recover in Ecuadorian Amazon

On the banks of the Aguarico River in the Ecuadorian Amazon, a group of Indigenous Siekopai women are combining traditional knowledge and modern technology to help a threatened native turtle recover. Their efforts center around charapa turtles (Podocnemis unifilis), also known as the yellow-spotted Amazon River turtle, Mongabay Latam’s Astrid Arellano reported. The animal’s populations have declined due to hunting adult turtles, harvesting eggs from nests and pollution from garbage, oil and gasoline. “Sometimes we see plastic, garbage bags,” Janeth Piaguaje, a Siekopai community leader of the project, told Mongabay Latam. “We also see dead animals floating down the river. We can’t control all of that, but we do make a significant effort to clean the beaches where we work.” Boat traffic is also eroding riverbanks, and climate change has caused water levels to rise, flooding the flats where turtles make their nests. Charapa turtles are listed as vulnerable by the IUCN, the global conservation authority. To help the turtles recover, a group of seven Siekopai women, who call themselves Tari Nomiowa’i, or “turtle women,” patrol the riverbanks looking for turtle tracks and nests. When they find nests, the women carefully collect the eggs, a skill Piaguaje said she learned from her father. “He taught me how to handle the eggs, how to see on what dates and in what months the turtles lay their nests,” she said. The women document the date, time, location and number of eggs in each nest using the Epicollect5 app, a field data collection tool. Then they take the eggs to an incubation facility where they are protected from predators, flooding and pollution. Once the eggs hatch, the women continue to care for the baby turtles for another month, feeding them cassava, sweet potato and taro leaves. Their painstaking work has paid off. Over the 2025-26 nesting season, the women collected 235 eggs and successfully hatched and released 208 hatchlings into the Aguarico River over March and April this year. The group invited the local community, including schoolchildren, to participate in the turtle release and attend workshops. “A little girl said, ‘I’m going to take care of them, I’m going to tell them not to touch the eggs,’” Piaguaje recalled. A driving force behind the work of the Tari Nomiowa’i is their culture and the ancestral belief that the turtles are a link between the visible and spiritual worlds, each swimming with protection from Koouwajëo, the spiritual chief, mother and ancestral guardian of the turtles. “I want Koouwajëo to be proud,” said Piaguaje. “When we protect turtles, we don’t just care for a species; we honor the spirits of the river, strengthen our culture and maintain the sacred pact between our community and nature.” Read the full story by Astrid Arellano in Spanish here. Banner image: The Tari Nomiowa’i women collecting charapa turtle (Podocnemis unifilis) eggs, taking data and measuring the nest. Image courtesy of CI Ecuador. Credits Topics