KUALA LUMPUR, May 3 -- By the time most guests on Pulau Perhentian have turned in for the night, the real work begins.

Under dim red lights, volunteers walk the shoreline in near silence, watching for movement in the sand - a telltale sign that a mother turtle has come ashore to lay her eggs. For Hayati Mokhtar, these nocturnal patrols are where her story truly begins.

What started as a small, almost experimental effort more than a decade ago has since grown into a sustained fight against poaching, habitat loss and human pressure - one that she helped build from the ground up.

"I felt that I was a custodian of a little bit of nature," she said, recalling how inheriting small plots of land on islands off Terengganu pushed her toward con...