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Fire in the Turtle House: The green sea turtle and the fate of the ocean by

Osha Gray Davidson. Perseus, $26, ISBN 1586480006

鈥淔UR ZIS leetle wurn zere ees no ope,鈥� intoned Jacques Cousteau over an image

on the TV of a hatchling sea turtle forlornly flapping in a gull鈥檚 beak,

providing my 1970s Sunday afternoon introduction to sea turtles and French

accents. Sadly, these creatures now have far more to contend with than the odd

hungry gull.

Fire in the Turtle House tells of the greatest threat ever faced by sea

turtles, which pre-date the dinosaurs. Worse than overfishing for tourist鈥檚 soup

and more disruptive than beach bars, it is an infection linked to pollution.

Fibropapillomatosis is even more unpleasant to have than it is to pronounce. In

infected turtles, tumours erupt in great clusters internally and externally. The

tumours are fatal. Originally known only from green turtles, the infection is

now an ocean-wide threat to all sea turtle stocks.

In an informative but non-technical style, Osha Gray Davidson tracks the

discovery of this disease and follows the small band of dedicated

conservationists who are trying to halt its spread. Ancient legends and telling

character sketches are combined with lucid reports from the front line of sea

turtle conservation. Davidson describes his own facemask-to-flipper encounters

to leaven up-to-date summaries of the sea turtle鈥檚 biology. The good news is

that he is donating part of the profits from the book to sea turtle

conservation. We can only hope that Cousteau鈥檚 doom-laden phrase does not now

refer to all seven species of modern sea turtle.