At sundown, a sea of turtles

Around this time every year, tens of thousands of millions of Olive Ridleys gather near the shore. On a particular day, as if on cue, they scramble on to the beach and lay ping pong ball-sized eggs. Ecologist Seshadri K S returns with a fascinating account of his turtle counting expedition

In February and March every year, the beaches of Gahirmatha and Rushikulya in Odisha witness one of the country's biggest non-human gathering.

It is ‘arribada’ (Spanish for arrival), the nesting season for Olive Ridley turtles. Through the night, millions of them emerge from the sea, dig up pits on the beach, and deposit their eggs in them.

In this week’s Saturday Story, an ecologist joins a group surveying nesting turtles in Rushikulya, Ganjam district. With the beach covered in turtles, he finds himself jostling with the creatures.

The researchers spent roughly 1,500 hours counting the turtles. They estimated that about five lakh had laid eggs.

Climate change is making survival challenging. Because of warmer temperatures, female hatchling numbers have gone up, and that is upsetting the balance. Unchecked development in fragile coastal areas is adding to their woes.

The roads got progressively narrower and the number of boards bearing a turtle painting more frequent. After multiple turns, we reached a barricade, manned by the Odisha Forest department staff. Having ensured that we were researchers, they let us pass.

I was accompanying a group of Bengaluru- based researchers studying sea turtles. They are at the forefront of their conservation. Numerous turns later, we reached another barricade, and this time, we were asked to

get out of the car and walk. In the fading evening light, we walked along a sandy road to the coast.

We could hear the sea. A distinct odour dominated the salty air — of rotting eggs mixed in salt water. After climbing down a rickety flight of stairs, we found ourselves amidst one of the largest congregations of non-humans in India.

Mass nesting

‘Arrival’ in Spanish, arribada is the name given to the mass nesting event of the Olive Ridley turtles (Lepidochelys olivacea). The beach was covered with turtles as far as the eye could see. There were thousands of them all around us and perhaps a few hundred thousand on the 7 km beach where the river Rushikulya joins the Bay of Bengal.

In February and March every year, these sea turtles congregate in the nearshore

waters. As if they have received a message, they scramble on the sandy beaches one night, and start to dig a pot-shaped pit about a foot deep with their hind flippers. They each deposit about a 100 ping pong ball-sized eggs into the pit, cover it with sand, and compact it by slamming their hard shell.

Exhausted from this arduous experience, which may last a few hours, they turn back into the sea, possibly to return in a couple of weeks, to repeat the process. This frenzy lasts two to 10 days.

The mass nesting of Olive Ridleys occurs in India, Costa Rica, Mexico, and now also on a small beach in the Andamans.

As we stood on the sandy beach, we saw the sun disappearing into the horizon behind us. The turtle traffic began to peak and there was not one moment when we could stand still. Turtles were scrambling over each other, to find sand away from the water line.

Within the first five minutes, I almost tripped and fell as a turtle collided with my heel. Before I could gather my composure, I felt a throbbing pain in my toes. Turns out another turtle had stepped on my feet with its front flippers.

The Olive Ridley measures about 2.5 ft in length. It weighs about 40 kilos and its flippers are muscular. The turtles also have a sharp claw on their flippers which can leave a scar.

As I recovered from the pain, I felt a stinging sensation on my leg from the sand that was splashed out by another turtle digging its nest. I decided to put the camera back into the pouch and turned on my headlamp. The faint glow of its red light was all we had to find walking space amidst the turtles.

Stroke of luck

“You are all incredibly lucky to be seeing this so easily,” said professor Kartik Shanker, as we made our way along the beach. “Twenty-six years ago, I was here in Rushikulya and learnt that the arribada had started in Gahirmatha. It took me a day and a half to reach there, covering 300 km!” he said.

Shanker is a professor at the Centre for Ecological Sciences at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) and a founding trustee of Dakshin Foundation, an NGO dedicated to coastal communities and marine ecosystems. It was all hands on deck for the Dakshin team, with over 25 researchers and volunteers whose only job was to monitor and document the arribada.

Seven species

Globally, there are seven species of sea turtles. Six belong to one family, while the seventh is a lone representative of another family. They are restricted to tropical waters and are often foraging in the continental shelves. Marine turtles evolved 110 million years ago, and many lineages have gone extinct.

Olive Ridley turtles are the smallest but the most abundant of them all.

Having spent a couple of hours dodging turtles, some of us headed back to Dakshin’s field station in the nearby town of Ganjam to freshen up and get dinner. We had started from Bengaluru at 8 am and reached the nesting site directly, with only a stop for tea and a coconut cookie. The rest of the team was already spread out along the beach, counting turtles. The field station is a cosy house with a history of hosting three generations of turtle biologists.

“Turtles have probably been nesting along the shifting sandy beaches near the mouth of Rushikulya river, for quite some time, but in 1994, Dambru, a local fisherman, told Bivash Pandav about mass nesting turtles,” recalled Shanker. “Over the years, the forest department, and researchers from the Wildlife Institute of India, Zoological Survey of India, Dakshin and IISc have conducted research on these populations,” he explained. The team from Dakshin and IISc has been monitoring them since 2007.

Keeping count

Counting the turtles is not easy. The first

attempt likely has been that of Robert Bustard, who in 1976 was invited to the mangroves at Bhitarknanika to advise on the conservation of crocodiles and gharials. He walked along the coastline with three men and dabbed paint on turtles to avoid recounting them. By this crude method, they counted over 1.5 lakh turtles.

Dakshin’s team monitors 28, 100 m segments, along the 3 km beach. I accompanied Vidisha Kulkarni, programme officer of the Marine Flagships Programme at Dakshin. Her work involves creating an inclusive and accessible outreach and engagement strategy. “Hold on to this rope, I will tell you what to do when we enter the segment,” she instructed. Having been married to each other for eight years, we had done enough field work together not to question any instructions.

I held on to the rope and started walking with her. We entered a segment, marked by a flag. We stretched out the rope and Vidisha told me to reach the shoreline and walk up

towards the tree line, away from the water. “As we walk parallelly, start counting the number of nesting turtles within the span of this 5 m rope,” she told me. We only had to count those actively laying eggs. In one sample, we counted 10 individuals.

Vidisha was excited as she had come to Ganjam last year, but the arribada never happened. “The beach seems to be saturated, look at the number of nests dug up by incoming turtles,” Vidisha exclaimed. The previous year, she had found a couple of solitary nesting turtles and seen many of the nests dug up by wild pigs. This year, the forest department had put a chain link fence near the tree line to keep the pigs away.

We had to be up all night as we had to take hourly counts in five segments. Sleep was out of the question. Even if we wanted to sleep, there was not an inch of ground to spare.

By 3 am, I could not keep awake, and decided to lie down on a steep sand mound near the tree line, away from the beach. Vidisha decided to carry on with the surveys and took a volunteer along. My forty winks were cut short by a slap across my face. Startled and groggy-eyed, I saw that a determined turtle had sneaked under the fence and was digging a nest right where I was resting. I did not know if I felt bad for being slapped or for the pain. The cold sea breeze certainly enhanced the pain.

I decided to get back to counting. That done, Vidisha and I climbed past the fence to sit at the tree line. We had about 20 minutes before the next survey. The moonlight was pale. We drifted off to sleep, only to be woken up by a loud snort. Letting out a scream, I turned on my headlamp. We saw a ball of dust, and something went crashing through the bushes. It must have been a wild pig. Pigs are known to harass turtles and rip apart their flippers. For a moment, both of us thought it was the other snoring. We had a good laugh.

Dakshin’s team surveyed nearly 3 km of the beach and estimated that about five lakh turtles had laid eggs during this year’s arribada. They had spent some 1,500 person-hours counting turtles over nine nights. By April, the beach would be riddled with baby turtles, scrambling to reach the water, only to return about 15 years later to lay eggs, as their mother once did.

Calm mornings

At 5 am, I was desperate for some chai. The jacket I wore failed miserably and the cold sea breeze got to me. We took a scooter and reached the East Coast Highway and found a shop selling tea. We quickly gulped two cups each, picked up a few chocolates for the rest of the team, and returned. By daybreak, the number of turtles had reduced dramatically.

We could see thousands of turtles in the water. They would remain there all day, return by evening and lay more eggs.

Turtles do a good job of camouflaging their nests. However, other turtles coming in to nest end up digging out other nests, which stinks up the place. The soft round exposed eggs were quickly polished off by hordes of crows and kites. A steady stream of visitors started to trickle in.

Over breakfast, Shanker recounted stories from the past and how much we all owe to the late Satish Bhaskar, who had left IIT and begun a lifelong association with turtles. In the early ’70s, Bhaskar joined the renowned herpetologist Romulus Whitaker to study turtles. He spent several years surveying beaches for turtles and wrote multiple research papers that form the bedrock of turtle biology in India.

Bhaskar once spent many months alone on an island in the Lakshadweep, counting nesting Green turtles. The boat that was supposed to pick him up was delayed by over a month and yet he survived quite nonchalantly. Some of the pioneering work started by Rom and Bhaskar resulted in the formation of the Students’ Sea Turtle Conservation Network in Chennai, which not only helped turtle conservation but also played an important role in shaping the careers of many ecologists, including Shanker.

Turtle mortalities

After another night helping count turtles, Shanker and I returned to Bengaluru. A few days later, speaking to a group of enthusiastic students of Conservation Practice at the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment, Shanker said, “Before Independence, people would collect eggs, and there was an egg tax levied by the zamindar. Eggs would be shipped out by the boatload to Kolkata for human consumption or cattle feed.”

The students had invited Shanker to speak at a roundtable, with turtle conservation being the topic of discussion. “In the ’70s, Bob Bustard witnessed the harvesting and recommended the banning of egg collection until one could get a sense of the turtle population. Unfortunately, the ban came up around the time the Wildlife Protection Act of 1972 was passed and is still followed, removing any room for sustainable use,” he explained. Over the last few months, about a thousand turtles have been estimated to have washed up ashore along the east coast of India. The ire of conservationists has been towards the fishing community because most of these turtles were victims of it. Turtles also die from being struck by boat propellers or being caught in ghost nets, but this proportion is too small compared to the deaths occurring from trawlers and long-line fishing.

In Odisha at least, 90 per cent of the mortality is from trawler fishing. The Gahirmatha Marine Sanctuary, has a 20 km long and 35 km wide area as a no-fishing zone, starting from the coast. Other sites have a 20 x 20 km ban on fishing during the nesting season. In Odisha, there is a 5-10 km ban on mechanised fishing, set by the Orissa Marine Fishing Regulations Act.

The local fishing communities get a small amount of compensation during the nesting season. However, offshore surveys by Dakshin show that turtles congregate in the nearshore area but rarely go past 4-5 km, and the 20 km ban is excessive.

Climate change

No one fully understands the arribada. Although turtles come ashore and nest solitarily, mass nesting may be a predator satiation strategy that occurs when turtle populations reach a critical number. Mass nesting is also thought to render safety in numbers. Even along the coast of Karnataka, there are solitary nesting Olive Ridley turtles. The forest department has established hatcheries where nests are collected and protected till the turtles hatch and are released into the sea.

However, all this effort pales in comparison to the threat of climate change. The sex of the hatching turtles is determined by temperature. “Warmer temperatures result in more females. Every year, we collect dead hatchlings, dissect their gonads, and examine them under a microscope to determine the proportion of male to female. Over the last decade, the hatchlings have been increasingly female. This trend is worrying,” explained Rahul M S, programme associate at Dakshin.

Added to this challenge is the thirst for development where fragile areas such as Andaman and Nicobar are being opened up for trade. Ports are being constructed on some beaches where leatherback turtles nest. A few years from now, the turtle that was born on the idyllic beach will return to nest on the same beach, only to find a port.

Weeks after returning to Bengaluru, I still find sand in my backpack. As I drift to sleep, I hear the thudding sound of the female packing the nest with sand. My mind wanders, and I imagine the turtle being a mascot and marine life being conserved. I wake up, only to realise that we cannot sit around, waiting for the mythical Kurmavatara to emerge and churn the sea to get at the elixir of life. This responsibility is on us. We need to be vigilant, aware, and compassionate to strike a meaningful balance between development and conservation. Perhaps then, the turtles shall continue to show up in large numbers and leave behind eggs, and the cycle is kept up for eternity.

(The author is an ecologist and faculty at Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment)