Northern River Terrapin

NLK0002 - Northern River Terrapin

Only 134 left in the wild - Only 134 shirts created

£68.00 GBP

Sixty centimetres of shell. Eighteen kilos. In the breeding season the males turn black and crimson with yellow eyes. It lives where the Ganges runs out into the sea, and almost nobody outside Bangladesh has heard of it.

Illustrated by Indian artist Revant Dasgupta.

NLK0002. The second drop of the Founding Collection.

There are 134 Northern River Terrapins living wild in the Sundarbans. So we made just 134 shirts. Each one numbered. When they're gone, they're gone, and we never reprint a drop.

10% of the price of this shirt goes to Vienna Zoo's Project Batagur baska.

We are trialling printing the full run up front this time rather than making them to order, so the wait is shorter than our first two drops. Orders ship from early October. We'll often beat it.

Relaxed fit, unisex, with a set-in sleeve so it sits cleaner than a true oversized tee. Fits slightly large; prefer a closer fit? Size down. Check the images and size guide below to find your fit.

215 GSM organic cotton. Screen-printed to last.

Detailed Sizing Guide

134 left in the wild - 134 shirts created

Subscriber pre-sale: 16th September 10am BST

Public drop: 18th September 10am BST

Northern River Terrapin

The turtle that became critically endangered overnight

Living in the wild: 134, in unfenced Forest Department ponds in the Sundarbans, open to the river

Where it lives: The Sundarbans, India and Bangladesh

Why it declined: Harvested for meat and eggs, and caught in fishing nets

Sixty centimetres of shell. Eighteen kilos. One of the largest freshwater turtles in Asia, living where the rivers of the Ganges delta run out into the sea.

For most of the year the males are olive and grey. Then the breeding season arrives and their heads turn black, their necks and forelimbs run crimson, and their eyes turn yellow.

A turtle that changes colour to be found.

It once lived along the estuaries from eastern India through Bangladesh to Myanmar. The adults were eaten, the eggs were dug up, and everything else went into nets set for fish. By 1995 there were around ten breeding females left in the Sundarbans.

Then a 2007 genetics paper split the river terrapins into two species, and most of what had been counted as Batagur baska was reclassified. It climbed the list of the most endangered turtles on Earth.

The first attempt to put captive-bred adults back into the Sundarbans river system failed. None were tracked past three months.

So the team went smaller. Forest Department stations across the Sundarbans each keep a freshwater pond where no fishing is allowed. Some sit five metres from the river so these are now technically wild.

134 terrapins have been released into those ponds. Nobody feeds them. They were checked at six months and at two years, and they are gaining weight. When they reach breeding age they can walk out into the Sundarbans to find a mate.

134 animals, unfed, unfenced and free to leave., this is the population we have used for this drop.

134 shirts.

Artist

Revant Dasgupta

Mumbai, India

Revant Dasgupta is an illustrator, painter and multimedia artist from Kolkata, now living in Mumbai. He works across painting, self-published zines and art books, comics, digital illustration and sound art. His work circles symbols and social hierarchies, drawn out of growing up in Kolkata.

He arrived at his current style after the pandemic, when he stopped liking his own work. He was following a lot of photographers at the time, and started building illustrations the way a photographer builds a shot. Framing rather than composing.

Asked to describe the style seriously, he says surreal. Asked to describe it any other way, he says weird.

Revant grew up in West Bengal, which is where the Northern River Terrapin lives.

He had never heard of it.

"I didn't even know it was a thing you get in West Bengal."

He watched documentaries while he worked and kept one playing in the background. He sketched the animal repeatedly before starting, which he doesn't normally do, because he wanted to understand how it looked before he drew it.

"Especially because of the red and the black. Very interesting colours."

See more of Revant's work

Why we work with real artists

Every NLK drop is illustrated by a human artist local to the species. Not AI. Not stock. Not outsourced to whoever's cheapest.

In a world where algorithms can generate endless "content," we think there's something worth protecting in the slow, deliberate work of a person putting pen to paper. The same way we think there's something worth protecting in a species that only exists in one place on Earth.

Art and wildlife have this in common: once the real thing is gone, no imitation will bring it back.

Conservation Partner

Vienna Zoo - Project Batagur baska

In 2010, Vienna Zoo began working on a species that had effectively stopped existing outside captivity.

The first move was to buy it back. Terrapins were still turning up on markets in Bangladesh and India, so the team worked through local contacts to reach traders and purchase individual animals. Those turtles went into a conservation centre built with the Bangladesh Forest Department.

In 2012 they laid their first eggs.

The project has hatched more than 900 terrapins since, every penny raised goes to the work happening on the ground.

There are now two breeding stations in Bangladesh, one of them in mangrove forest in the Sundarbans. Adults live in large ponds and come out onto sand to lay in March. The eggs are incubated where they were laid. Two months later the hatchlings go into smaller ponds and are fed for years before they are old enough to be released.

Most of the work is repair. Dr Doris Preininger, the scientist who runs the project at Vienna Zoo, describes a summer of rain that took the nesting sand away. A broken wall at the station near the capital that let the turtles walk out of their pond. Hatcheries rebuilt every year. Cages over the nests, because monitor lizards take the eggs and monkeys take the food. Everything metal rusts.

The keepers arrive by boat from another village.

Vienna Zoo funds the things that cannot be allowed to stop, which is the food for every turtle and the wages of the keepers and station managers. Everything else gets written into grant applications, year after year.

The construction, the keeping and the station management are done by people who live there.

"So that people see that there is money to be made with the species being alive."

The threat now is not poaching. Nobody in the Sundarbans is hunting terrapins, because there are too few left to be worth hunting. The threat is nets, and fishing is how families in the Sundarbans eat. The project's ask of fishers is small and specific. If you find one, let it go.

10% of the price of this shirt goes to Vienna Zoo's Project Batagur baska.

Learn more about Project Batagur baska