Sabine Schoppe, protector of Palawan’s forest turtles, dies

On 17 June 2015, Philippine officials confiscated thousands of turtles kept in cement tanks in a warehouse in Palawan, an island province of the Philippines. More than 3,800 of them were endangered Palawan forest turtles, piled up to a dozen deep and waiting to be exported. Some had ulcers on the undersides of their shells or open wounds on their feet, and others had been bitten by the turtles crowded in beside them.

Sabine Schoppe organised the response. No facility was equipped to handle thousands of turtles, so students built shade and shelters, and a former crocodile enclosure became an emergency pond. Schoppe and her colleagues worked around the clock, joined by veterinarians and turtle specialists who came from abroad. “Yesterday by sadness and work, now by hope,” she wrote after help began to arrive.

Schoppe had come to the Philippines from Germany in 1995, after finishing a doctorate in biology. She started with bird surveys and coastal resource management in the Visayas, then moved to the State Polytechnic College of Palawan, now Western Philippines University, where she was a guest professor of aquatic and marine biology. She was also an associate editor of The Palawan Scientist.

The Palawan forest turtle, known locally as the bakoko, was first described scientifically from specimens said to have come from the island of Leyte. Those specimens were later destroyed in the bombing of Manila in the Second World War, and for decades scientists did not know where the turtles lived, until they were finally found in Palawan.