We’ve seen more than a few turtles in our travels. Whether in or out of the water, it’s always a joy. But never have we seen so many in one place as we saw here in Mexico in the arribada hatching season. We got incredibly lucky, lucky, lucky and just happened to be passing the right place at the right time! Wowser! (click here for video)
Driving along the Pacific coast of Oaxaca State, we stopped off at Playa de Moro Ayuta around 50km west of Bahias Hualtulco. It’s a very rare arribada turtle beach, one of only a few worldwide. From Mr Google we knew that ‘arribada’ is a nesting phenomenon of the Olive Ridley sea turtle, when thousands of them nest on a single beach around the same time. It’s known as ‘predator swamping’: the turtles deposit more eggs in the sand than predators can consume, thereby increasing the hatchlings’ chance of survival.
After gestation of around 45 days under the sand, all the eggs start to hatch around the same time (not surprising really, given that they were all laid around the same time) and we couldn’t believe our luck to be passing just around hatching time! Approaching the 6km long wild and desolate beach, we saw little back dots and what looked like scraps of white paper all over the beach as far as we could see. The black dots were baby turtles and the white scraps were discarded turtle egg-shells.
Taking a closer look, we were shocked to see how many of the ‘little black dots’ were clearly ex-turtles. Thousands of scattered tiny hatchlings lying dead – it was heart-wrenching. But thousands more of them were survivors, scrambling between their lifeless siblings. The survivors had a long schlepp to reach the sea. Some little chaps were racing along energetically to the lapping waves, but others looked utterly exhausted, struggling to put one flipper in front of the other. It’s a brutal survival-of-the-fittest out there… natural selection we guess. Local ladies were out collecting the survivors into buckets and depositing them into the sea, so we helped collect any that we could find that still had life and gave them a lift to the water.
As we ferried the weaker ones across the beach, more and more and more were emerging out of the sand around us. It was such a joy to witness so many cute little faces pushing and shoving each other out the way, heaving themselves out of the sand nests. The sad bit was that at least half of the hatchlings seemed to have used all their energy just to reach the surface. They struggled into the light, flopped onto the sand and never moved an inch. We helped as many as we could, but even when introduced to the ocean, the little weaklings simply didn’t have the energy to battle with the water.
Just like our extraordinary monster leather-back turtle experience back in French Guiana, this arribada turtle beach another amazing and unforgettable turtle time for us. It was at the same time both uplifting and devastating – a spectacular show of the joy and the cruelty of nature.