"Little kids giddily squeal as a baby sea turtle, flippers flapping, lurches toward the water with the grace of a drunk lunging for a cab at closing time. Tourists applaud as about a dozen more palm-sized hatchlings stumble into the sea. The tourists had gathered at daybreak on an April day for the Velas Turtle Festival, on the western Indian coast, where volunteers invite visitors to watch them release baby turtles from a hatchery like an animal pen on the sand."
"The volunteers collected the eggs from turtle nests on the shore, effectively holes that females dig with their flippers, and where they lay dozens of eggs at a time. The eggs are taken inside the hatchery to protect them from predators, such as dogs and gulls. View this post on Instagram A post shared by NPR (@npr) Once the babies hatch, they're released under supervision to ensure the predators don't pick them off as they crawl to the sea."
"Even after all those efforts, most of them will be killed by predators in the waters. Only one out of every 1,000 olive ridleys is likely to ever reach maturity. The slim survival rate of olive ridley sea turtles comes with other pressures that have left them listed as "vulnerable" to extinction by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, even as they inhabit a global band of tropical waters."
At Velas on India's western coast, volunteers collect olive ridley turtle eggs from shore nests and incubate them in a hatchery to protect them from predators before supervised release. Hatchlings are released at dawn during a festival, but most fall prey in the sea and only about one in 1,000 reaches maturity. Olive ridleys are listed as vulnerable due to combined pressures: bycatch in fishing nets, large-scale slaughter for meat and leather, and egg poaching. Around two decades ago, researchers counted roughly 100,000 nests nationwide, prompting concern that unchecked threats could have caused population crashes.
Read at www.npr.org
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]