23
May-2018

World Turtle Day – Olive Ridley Sea Turtles

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Olive Ridley Sea Turtles are listed as vulnerable under IUCN. The sea turtles are protected under the ‘Migratory Species Convention’ and CITES (Convention of International Trade on Wildlife Flora and Fauna).

Olive Ridley turtle ( Scientific name- Lepidochelys olivacea) is smallest and most abundant of all sea turtle found in world. It gets its name from its olive coloured carapace, which is heart-shaped and rounded. It is found in warm waters of Pacific and Indian oceans….

These turtles are best known for their unique mass nesting called Arribada, where thousands of females come together on the same beach to lay eggs .

Interestingly, females return to the very same beach from where they first hatched, to lay their eggs. They lay their eggs in conical nests about one and a half feet deep which they laboriously dig with their hind flippers. In the Indian Ocean, the majority of olive ridleys nest in two or three large groups near Gahirmatha in Odisha

Olive ridley sea turtles migrate in huge numbers from the beginning of November, every year, for mating and nesting along the coast of Orissa. Gahirmatha coast has the annual nesting figure between one hundred to five hundred thousand, each year. There has been decline in the population of these turtles in the recent past due to mass mortality.

Olive ridleys often migrate great distances between feeding and breeding grounds. Using satellite telemetry tags, scientists have documented both male and female olive ridleys leaving the breeding and nesting grounds off the Pacific coast of Costa Rica migrating out to the deep waters of the Pacific Ocean.

Velas beach in Ratnagiri , Maharashtra celebrates the Velas turtle festival from February to April. Hundreds of Olive Ridley Turtles, one of the most treasured species of marine turtles, come ashore at Velas beach for breeding and lay hundreds of eggs

Olive ridley travel thousands of kilometers in ocean to reach back to Velas which is their breeding site.Its interesting to know that only female turtles will come back to Velas beach for laying their eggs. Male turtles will not come back to beach again. Female turtles will visit the shore during late evening, make a pit on sandy beach, lay the eggs in pit, cover it up with her fins and then leave back to sea, to never come back.

Today, locals are involved in every step of the process: surveying the beach for eggs, collecting and transferring them into artificial hatcheries which are monitored till the eggs hatch. The babies are then collected and released twice a day.

On release, when the hatchlings head to the sea, they record the place’s geomagnetic field intensity, remembering it till they return as adults.

The life of a turtle is so tough that no baby turtle ever receives any kind of parental love and care like human beings. Poor turtles do not even see their parents in their life time !!

Fifteen years later, the females from the batch will reappear to nest and lay eggs at the exact spot of their birth. They will hatch 50-60 days later. And the cycle goes on.

NGOs like Sahyadri Nisarga Mitra, which co-organizes turtle festival Maharashtra, works towards spreading awareness about these endangered species.

In 2012 I managed to click few photosgraphs of Olive Ridley Sea Turtles.

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