Dec-2015
Baby Sea Turtle release in Puerto Escondido
The cutest thing I’ve seen so far – that’s the feeling these guys gave me when they started blinking their big black eyes while moving their bodies in the rhythm of the ocean. It’s for sure that they’ll all be good swimmers, even while they have a pretty awful sounding one percent survival rate. Cute little sea turtles – we got a chance to help them make it.
The love story of a sea turtle
Female sea turtles push themselves up onto the beach to lay eggs after making sweet turtle love in the motion of the ocean. A pregnant turtle lays about 110 ping-pong sized eggs in a large hole of sand and then covers the egg chamber with her back flippers with a smooth layer of sand until it is completely hidden. That’s how far being a mother goes for a sea turtle as she returns to the ocean after having camouflaged her nest. The local community workers in Puerto Escondido, who are concerned about the sea turtles, collect the eggs while driving for 7 kilometer along the beach to find the hidden nests and move them to a protected area at playa Bococho for their incubation time. The protected nests have an expected hatching date written down on a piece of tape so that once the baby sea turtles hatch they can be collected for their safe release into the ocean.
Going on a turtle release tour
Yesterday Thom and I decided that we should help to set baby turtles free into the ocean. We’d been walking around in Puerto thinking about going to the lake where plankton can be seen as a kind of glow in the dark phenomenon, but we hadn’t yet realized that now was also the season of adorable little sea turtles to hatch from their eggs.
If you’ve never heard about people collecting turtle eggs from their original nest to place them somewhere safer, then you probably thought that tourists releasing baby turtles on the beach sounds like going on an elephant ride in Thailand or doing a walk with a most likely drugged lion in Africa. To be able to release turtles you’d need to capture them first, right? To get that idea out of your head you should know that when people put these eggs in a protected area they help increasing the turtle’s chances of survival. Now who wouldn’t like to help putting those recently hatched little baby turtles on the beach and send them off for their big adventure at sea? They all have to be placed on the sand close to the ocean where they’ll wiggle their way towards the water. However some also try to crawl back to you as they have a broken GPS and need a bit of help finding the ocean. That’s where you come in.
We released the baby turtles – Prieta or Green Sea Turtle & Golfina or Olive Ridley Sea Turtle – before sunset, so that they’d have a better chance at surviving. If we’d set them free in the middle of the day most of the little ones would die due to the heat. It is also much harder to spot the tiny baby sea turtles around sunset which makes it more safe against predators of which most will have called it a day when the sun goes down.
Do you want to release some cute baby sea turtles too?
If you’re in Puerto Escondido and you want to release baby sea turtles you should try to be there somewhere in between October and May. We booked a tour with Manglar Bird Watch and paid MEX250 per person for the complete baby turtle release tour.
We decided to go to the Laguna de Manialtepec for another MEX250 afterwards to see the – glow in the dark – plankton, but we loved seeing the sea turtles a lot more.
About Renate Rigters
Ever since I left my home country I felt at home at any other place I went to. I enjoy getting to know more cultures by talking to strangers and hearing their philosophy about life. Speaking with gestures when you can not find a shared language, finding places only the locals go to and learn about their customs and values. Hanging out with local people makes me happy. The experience of every new place is a step out of your comfort zone where I like to wander around until it feels like a second home.
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Cuuuuute!
Lief hèa 🙂
This must be the cutest thing ever! <3
Oh they sure are 🙂
Where you told that you could touch them? It can be really harmful to touch a turtle. I have also completed one of these baby releases and there is no way that we would ever be allowed to touch them
Hi Nina, thanks for your message. These baby turtles were always released during sunrise/sunset by taking the young ones from the protected area in kind of a bucket to the beach and people would release them there. I actually did some research afterwards to gain more knowledge about harmfulness of touching them. It’s about the turtles having to find their way back to where they hatched once they are mature enough to make their own nest. There are different ways to release them, but I think a big difference is that this was in Mexico. Unfortunately there are still people stealing turtle eggs for food and that’s why the eggs get protected by a beach patrol and even moved to a secure area to help improve their survival rate. Afterwards they release the babies at sunrise or sunset near the water.
I can totally understand that it would be better to leave the nest, the eggs and let the turtles go from there to the water in their own way, but I guess it depends on the area risks. I will try to find out more about your questions and get back to you again. Where did you complete a baby turtle release?
Happy Travels, Renate
I released baby turtles last week In Puerto Escondido. We were told that the turtles could be fatally harmed by lotions and chemicals naturally found on our skin. We were given the turtles in a container which we carried to the line and from which we carefully set them free without actually touching them. This was not a commercial tour. We received our instructions and information directly from the community volunteers who comb the beaches to rescue the eggs.
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