Bubbles in the Bathtub

Saw the following story this morning...

Scientists plan to clone turtles by 2010
Malay Mail, Malaysia
http://www.mmail.com.my/Current_News/MM/Monday/National/20050718105458/Article/index_html
Synopsis: ... on turtle cloning has been submitted by SEAFDEC-MFRDMD to the Japanese Government, which supports conservation and enhancement of sea turtles programmes in

Also here:
http://www.nst.com.my/Current_News/NST/Monday/National/20050718093816/Article/indexb_html

From a conservation perspective cloning turtles seems pretty silly. There are a lot of proven and effective conservation techniques that could be employed, and probably for a lot less money (ie public education, nesting beach protection and monitoring, etc). There are even more things, like fishery by-catch reduction, that would be even more effective, but hard to say how the costs compare. If the organizations funding this work were really interested in sea turtle conservation, there are better ways to go about it.

There doesn't seem to be much point in cloning more turtles in to the world unless something is done to reduce existing threats and/or improve the regulatory environment that they live in. The cloned turtles would be subject to all the same threats and would not survive any better than the "natural" turtles.