Subscribe and turn on notifications🔔 : [ Ссылка ] | In a rush to build houses for Australia’s growing population, something truly gruesome was buried underneath hundreds of family homes in Sydney.
Lying dead beneath the concrete slabs are the bodies of thousands of turtles, fish and eels.
Many of the animals had been living in farm dams and wetlands which were filled in and then paved over by developers. The situation was worse during winter, because that’s when turtles were hibernating underground, so they slowly suffocated beneath the construction.
Turtle expert Associate Professor Ricky Spencer doesn’t think most people realise that not all councils or developers relocate fish and reptiles when they drain wetlands.
He said, “In the past, anything that wasn’t endangered was ignored. I’ve seen some wetlands where they’d just put the earth over the top.”
Today, Spencer believes councils are better at integrating wetlands into developments following minor changes to environmental protections in NSW and pressure from communities.
Ecologist Kane Durrant told Yahoo News Australia he is regularly called in by developers to collect turtles from dams and creeks as they’re drained. He said, “Up until five or 10 years ago, they were regularly buried alive. It still happens from time to time. But now developers have to have an ecologist on site… and we can take the animals to a safer place.”
Despite this, Durrant believes simply moving the turtles to new waterbodies is not a “sustainable” solution. He said, “We regularly find anywhere from 25 to 50 turtles in a dam, and sometimes you get an outlier where we’ll pull out 200 in a single dam. If we keep removing them as we develop the Sydney Basin, where do those thousands of turtles go?”
Durrant added, “We’d love to see some wetlands implemented into these new estates… so we can sort of see people and native wildlife living alongside each other.”
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