My Midnight Surprise Turtle Release

It’s common to hear people these days talk about “willing things into existence” or “putting it out into the universe”. I have never been a big believe in that concept, but I am 98% positive I willed a turtle hatching into existence last night.

I wrote my turtle blog yesterday, spent most of my dives photographing them and editing photos and videos of them, and was then assigned to the 11pm turtle walk last night. I’ve done plenty of these since being here, all of which were just a 45 minute lap around the island with no sign of turtles or tracks. Sitting around waiting for 11pm last night, I just had a feeling I was finally going to see something. I took off with Jeeth, our science officer, and Laura, a new girl from Australia around 10:55pm. As we started the walk Laura asked if I had ever seen anything on the turtle walk, to which I replied “no, but maybe we’ll be lucky”.

Only 15 minutes into our walk, we stopped by the neighboring resort’s turtle hatchery. This hatchery is home to all the turtle eggs found on the island and provides a safe and protected environment for the turtles until they are ready to hatch. As we approached Jeeth shined a flashlight on the area and we saw a cat quickly climb the fence and run away. Jeeth took off immediately into the hatchery with Laura and I close behind only to find a plot of freshly hatched baby turtles.

I couldn’t believe it! The odds of finding a turtle on a walk are very small, but the odds of finding a freshly hatched nest are even smaller. They were all about 3 inches long and tiny, squirming around and climbing on top of each other. The sign on their nest said that they were found in January and were expected to hatch on March 14th, with 61 eggs in total. We waited with the baby turtles for about half an hour until our camp director arrived with some buckets to transport them to the dark side of the island. We counted 31 total, meaning that the other half had not hatched yet. We walked to the other side of the island and two people pointed flash lights out into the sea while another released the turtles into the sand. We watched carefully as some wandered in the wrong direction and used the flashlights to guide them into the sea.

Some interesting things I learned:

-Turtles need to touch sand and walk into the sea themselves after being hatched because that is how they imprint on their home beach. If you take a sea turtle and put it in another ocean, it will always know where home is

-One hatching of eggs contains offspring from multiple males

-Ideally the turtles will all hatch at once, though the nest we came across did not. The eggs are buried in the sand, so by hatching all at once they have more buddies to work together with and dig themselves out

-Baby turtles really are so disoriented by light. About 15 out of the 31 turtles walked up or across the beach in the wrong direction due to mistaking resort lighting for moonlight. Because of this, the ideal time for a release is dawn, as there is limited to no artificial light

Overall this was such a cool experience and one I feel lucky to have been apart of. It’s sad to think how many obstacles and predators these little turtles have ahead, and in reality most of these guys won’t make it. It really makes you appreciate how special a turtle is and how important the work being done here is for their survival.