Amazon river turtles have a long history of over-exploitation, firstly for oil production, and lately as a luxury food for the expanding human population. In many areas, the populations of the two main commercial species Podocnemis expansa and P. unifilis are now so low that extinction is in sight. In 1985 a WWF-US project aimed at investigating interactions between economic development and wildlife populations conducted a case-study of the exploitation of turtles on the River Tefé in western Brazilian Amazonia.
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Andrew D. Johns (1987) studied this question.
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