three turtles left

I met Marcus the other night at the Yacht Club here in Lae. He is a German from Stuttgart in sud Deutschland nach Munchen. He is a marine biologist working for an Hawaiian Research institute involved in studying turtles and their survival. He had just come back from a research flight - the pilots plane is a short take off one and they can fly low at only about 120kph - i think he said kph and they were able to spot the turtles nests at about 100metres alt. I was interested in his work following his description of them as 800kg reptiles with flippers nearly a metre long and half a metre wide, with a body over two metres long and so bulky they had to use the high tide to get up on to the sand to lay their eggs but he was describing the precision of building their nests, in the latter design stages scooping only a teaspoonful of sand. But he told me about in Malaysia where once they had a population in the tens of thousands and now they had a population of - You guess he said. About a thousand. No, lower he said. Three. Three turtles.
He said you imagine being one of those three turtles and trying to make your species survive. Thought about in those terms I almost became claustrophobic. If I were the only one of my kind left, rather than imagine the space, I feel enclosed by having noone to share with. Such huge sadness for those animals with none of their kind to play with or hunt with. How does an animal bear the loneliness. We find it hard enough.