Island Books
Author explores fatal disease afflicting honu

By Wanda A. Adams
Advertiser Book Critic

Four-Spot was first sighted in 1992, healthy and playful. This photo was taken in 1995, the last year for this turtle, a victim of fibropapillomatosis. Ursula Keuper-Bennett/Peter Bennett Book-signing and lecture with Osha Gray Davidson 7 p.m. signing, 7:30 p.m. talk, Nov. 13, Waikiki Aquarium. Free, seating limited Book sales benefit aquarium Information: 923-9741 More on turtles: The Honu Project, hawaii50.com/honu or call Laurie McKeon, 732-4668

Davidson, in his just-released book, "Fire in the Turtle House"(Public Affairs, $26) begins his examination of a cancerous plague that is killing sea turtles around the world, but especially here in Hawai'i. He ends the book by making a striking point: "Wherever any of us goes, we are always in the Turtle House."

"Fire in the Turtle House" reads as readily as a detective story, and Davidson connects the dots for anyone who questions why they should care. The reason is given to him by Maui kahuna Sam Ka'ai, who claims the honu as his 'aumakua, or ancestral spirit: "We are all children of the sea."

Davidson is not speaking of the past here, crawling up out of the primordial ooze, or anything so remote as that. He is speaking of the perilous present.

The ocean, he points out, is a primary source of food for hundreds of thousands of poor people. It plays a vital role in the water cycle. Its health is an indicator of the general health of the planet. And the ocean has deep spiritual meaning as well, as anyone who lives in Hawai'i, Hawaiian or not, can attest.

But today, he explains, our oceans are like the world's population of turtles: threatened. Like a turtle in the early stages of the disease, the oceans continue to function, but the signs of disaster, as with the first visible tumors on a turtle's skin, are everywhere: dying coral reefs, blooms of poisonous microorganism that kill thousands of fish at once, bays where no thinking person would swim or fish for fear of infection. He warns that the oceans cannot continue forever to swallow the literal rivers of poisons that flow into them every day.

The story of the sea turtles, among the planet's oldest creatures, is just one foreboding chapter in the story of the planet, Davidson says.

Six of the earth's seven remaining species of sea turtles are afflicted with tumor disease, though their habitats are spread throughout the planet, separated by continents and thousands of miles of ocean.

The disease is fibropapillomatosis — FP, for short — and it causes tumors to ravage uncontrolled through a turtle's body. The tumors crowd the sensitive skin around the eyes, blinding the foraging animals so that they can't find food. The tumors grow around the flippers and interfere with the graceful swimmers' ability to move. Eventually, the disease afflicts vital organs, shutting down life functions.

FP turtles inevitably die, except for the few that are caught early by researchers or turtle rescuers, and have their tumors surgically removed. In Maui's Turtle House today, according to Ursula Keuper-Bennett and her husband, Peter, who have been documenting the lives of the honu of Honokowai for a dozen years, 70 percent of turtles there are afflicted. Near Kane'ohe, the rate of infection is higher.

Davidson traces the efforts of this country's small, dedicated band of self-nicknamed "Turtleheads" — including interested amateurs, like the Bennetts, and professionals like the well-known O'ahu turtle advocate marine biologist George Balazs of the National Marine Fisheries Service — to document the spread of the disease and search for its cause. (Though both a virus and biotoxins from plant sources are suspected, the answer still eludes researchers, and time is running out.)

Davidson's writing is neither romanticized nor poetic; rather, it is the best kind of journalistic reporting: clear and well-paced, employing individual human experiences — his own as well as those of dozens of people he interviewed — to elucidate the global problem. He writes for people who don't have biology degrees in a way that scientists will likely respect, simplifying the science but not the issues.

Davidson acknowledges a problem that Turtleheads and other reptile appreciators know well: If it doesn't have feathers or fur, a lot people just don't care. His descriptions of encounters with turtles create sympathy without sloppy sentimentality, another potential downfall of works of this kind.

There may well be some controversy about this book; debate invariably swirls around science reporting, especially when it impinges on the interests of bureaucrats and businesses (which, Davidson reports, have been slow to take seriously the FP plague and its implications). But there can be no argument about the job of writing and reporting Davidson has done: It's first-rate.

Wanda Adams can be reached at 535-2412, wadams@honoluluadvertiser.com.