Sea Turtle Conservation in Costa Rica
Late in 2022 I spent three weeks in a remote village on Costa Rica’s Caribbean coastline working with endangered green sea turtles. I was there as an ‘eco-volunteer’. I paid for the privilege of working alongside the scientists and research assistants gathering vital data on turtles to aid in their conservation and preservation. The organisation I went with, Sea Turtle Conservancy (STC), is the oldest turtle research and advocacy service in the world. My experience in Costa Rica was life changing in so many ways, not least of which, was a renewed commitment to adventure, travel, and conservation.
When I first decided to volunteer I wasn’t even sure where in Central America Costa Rica was, let alone the village where Sea Turtle Conservancy has a base. Costa Rica shares a border with Panama to the south, and Nicaragua to the north. It is a thin spit of land full of volcanoes, cloud forests, and an incredible biodiversity for such a small place. The government has protected large tracts of land as national parks and it’s the only country in the world to have reversed deforestation. These facts, along with the Costa Rican philosophy of ‘Pura Vida’ or Pure Life, make it an exotic destination. I couldn’t wait to go.
There was a problem though. The STC website was very clear on its expectations for eco-volunteers. We had to be able to walk five-eight miles (about 10-12 kilometres) every night for four-five hours on soft sand. I asked my physio about it.
‘That’s a lot,’ she said. ‘I’ll set you up with a program. You’ll use the soleus machine to strengthen your calves and the lat pull down to build up your back muscles. What other training are you doing?’ I told her I was walking for an hour to an hour and a half three times a week with a longer hike on weekends. She nodded and added resistance training to my program; leg raises, bridges, and side-to-side crab walks.
It was 9 months to departure at this point. I was consistently walking for three-three and half hours on soft sand once a week but I was struggling to walk longer. I checked and re-checked the website hoping for clues as to just how soft, the soft sand was. The pictures were unclear. Maybe the beach had a greater width of harder sand, maybe the sand wasn’t as soft as my local beach, or maybe it was much softer. I really didn’t know. So, I kept training, beating off nightmare thoughts of not being able to manage the four-five hours of soft sand walking every night, and the reminder the experience was physically demanding on participants. I tried to ignore comments from well-intentioned people warning me about the ‘drugs, crime and kidnappings’, and decided to stop checking the smarttraveller.gov.au website which told me I need to ‘exercise a high degree of caution’ when visiting Costa Rica due to ‘high levels of violent crime’. I questioned every day, as my departure date drew near, what I was doing and why I was going. I was desperate to go because I wanted an adventure, but I was terrified as well.
After a week in Costa Rica’s capital (San José), I left for Tortuguero National Park and the start of my eco-volunteering. The only way to reach Tortuguero (except by small plane) is by boat. And the only way to get to that boat was via the port town of La Pavona, one of the ugliest places in all Costa Rica. La Pavona is no more than a car park sidled up to a town. People who live and visit Tortuguero and the National Park have to leave their cars in La Pavona and wait in a big green pavilion for their boats to arrive. I was waiting for the Mwamba Lodge boat but locals waited for water taxis to take them via a series of canals and rivers to Tortuguero, over an hour’s ride away.
The boat twisted and turned along labyrinthine waterways. The guide pointed out exotic creatures; caiman-a type of crocodile, emerald basilisks, tiger herons-who have an uncanny ability to stretch their necks out to almost twice its length, white-faced capuchin, and spider monkeys to name a few. I marvelled at the wildlife almost within arm’s length. As the river widened and we passed more covered vessels, I knew we were getting close to Tortuguero.
I drew in a deep breath at my first sight of Sea Turtle Conservancy’s research station tucked between Mwamba lodge and the village. It is situated on a narrow spit of land no more than a hundred metres wide, the river spilling into a lagoon twice the width of the land on one side and the Caribbean on the other. The station has a scientist residence, where I was staying, a separate dining room, staff accommodation, a visitor’s centre with a small museum, and a dormitory where the research assistants lived.
Sea Turtle Conservancy began as the Caribbean Conservation Corporation thanks to the efforts of Dr Archie Carr, a researcher from the University of Florida, who first began working with turtles in Tortuguero in the 1950s. Since then, STC has established itself as a local and international beacon for research and preservation into the largest population of green sea turtles in the Western Hemisphere, as well as vital research into other turtles such as leatherbacks and hawksbills. It was also instrumental in helping the Costa Rican government establish the Tortuguero National Park and, as a result, has been recognised by the Smithsonian Institute as one of the most successful marine conservation efforts in the world.
I spent the next week working with an allied organisation called Coastal Jaguar Conservation but then it was time to don the all-black, long-sleeved shirt and pants, head torch, maximum strength insect repellant, and step onto the black volcanic soft sands in search of turtles. Turtles nest at night and so our patrols focussed on the hours between 8pm and 4am.
We found our first turtle straight away. She had finished ‘body-pitting’ (settling into a well in the sand) and had started digging her egg chamber. I watched, mesmerised, as the turtle reached down, one rear flipper at a time, to dig a cylindrical hole in the sand. Meanwhile, the research assistants (or RAs) busied their equipment; gloves and counter for tallying the eggs, a reel of measuring tape, bright pink plastic ribbons for triangulating the nests so the eggs chamber could be found later, tags and pliers and scanners, waterproof yellow notebooks, callipers, and measuring tape for the carapace (or shell) measurements.
'Do you want to count the eggs, Jacqui?’ the young biologist from Mexico asked.
‘Sure,’ I nodded, feeling quite the opposite.
‘Wait until I scrape some sand out from behind her so you can lie down,’ she said. ‘Once you’ve got your hand under her, let the eggs drop into your palm. She’ll lay about three at a time, but don’t count the yolk-less ones.’
‘How will I know they’re yolk-less?’
‘The normal eggs are about the size of a golf ball and soft but the yolk-less eggs are much smaller. You’ll know them when you feel them. And one more thing,’ she said, pointing her head torch to the underside of the turtle, ‘try not to touch her.’
I swallowed a gulp of air as I lay down in the sand, ignoring the biting sand flies, and waited for the first eggs to drop. I bit my lip. I was scared I’d hurt the turtle and I didn’t want her to get spooked and abandon her nest. Then I felt the first gloopy bundle and a clutch of three eggs landed in my gloved hand. I clicked the counter and let them fall into the chamber. Then more eggs came and more until I was so busy counting them, I lost track of everything else. The Mexican biologist handed me the end of a tape measure, showing me how to wedge it between my 3rd and 4th fingers, while they wrote the nest code on the pink plastic which was tied to three points, tree, bush, branch. When the egg tally reached 80, I dropped a thermometer into the nest. The thermometer would be used later to determine the temperature in the egg chamber when the turtles hatched.
When the turtle finished laying, we put away the counter and pulled out the tagging devices. First the research assistants scanned the turtle’s flippers for signs of other tags, noted the codes and put in new tags. Then it was my turn. I drew the callipers out to their widest, reached down into the pit where the turtle was covering her chamber, blinked as the turtle flicked sand in my face, and tried to hold the callipers still while the turtle shoved dirt into her hole. I repeated this three times while reaching for sand-encrusted fogged-up glasses to read the measurements. When that was done, I took out the measuring tape and measured from the top of the carapace, where the shell meets the neck, and draped the tape down to the furthest point at the tail. I read a measurement between 90-120cm and repeated that three times with glasses now caked in dirt. Finally, I did the body check. The scientists divide the body into eight parts; the front flipper, the right side of the shell, right rear flipper, tail, left flipper, left side of the shell, left front flipper and finally, neck. We never touched the neck but gave it a visual scan to check all was well.
Once the body check was complete and any anomalies such as notches or barnacles were noted, we left the turtle to finish camouflaging her nest and heave herself back to the water. I watched my first turtle make her return journey to the ocean. The sea wetted her shell so it shone like a reflection of the moon itself. It was a surreal moment. Here I was, with the most elemental of creatures, on a wild, remote beach with the sound of waves lapping and a distant thunderstorm brewing, and it was fantastic. Nature had never felt so raw or so close. I felt entwined with nature in a way I’d not felt before. It’s hard to put into words what the moment meant to me, but purity comes close.
On the beach patrols I felt the eeriness of the jungle. We walk in wild spaces in the daytime but are tucked away in our tents or cabins at night. Rarely do we walk in the late dark and yet, here I was, on lonely beaches feeling the silence and emptiness in a profound way. The research assistants talked of ‘working’ the turtles, and feeling a prickling sensation on the back of their necks, and then looking up into the neon green eyes of a jaguar at night. Jungles are meant to be alive with pattering agoutis, screeching monkeys, calling Great Curassows but at night there is nothing, nothing except the heaving turtles, and the watching jaguars.
During the day I helped the research assistants with track surveys (a count of the total number of nests from the night before) which also included checking for predation activity and nests close to hatching. A single female turtle will lay five to six times a season with each nest containing about 100 eggs. It takes approximately two months for the eggs to hatch. Only one in a thousand baby turtles (or hatchlings) make it to adulthood and those odds have greatly reduced with added predation by dogs and poachers (illegal but it still continues). At sea, meanwhile, there are threats from plastics, boats and marine predators. Little is known about turtles once they reach the sea-scientists call this the ‘missing years’. What is known, is that turtles remain at sea for up to 30 years until they are ready to nest (turtles can live up to 120 years). Then they return to exactly the same beach where they were born. When they do return to nest, they lay their eggs within five metres of a previous nest, every time. No one knows how the turtles find their way back to the same place, although some theories suggest the tiny turtles gain a magnetic imprint of their beach which allows them to find it again years later.
The struggle to reach the water is real. The hatchlings face threats from predators such as hawks and vultures plus they have to navigate debris, holes from turtle nests, and logs, vines, and rubbish. Watching these tiny creatures dash to the ocean was one of the highlights of the track surveys. When the hatchling reaches the water, they lift onto their flippers (strengthened from their run down the beach), as if to take in a gasp of the salt tang, before they are engulfed in the waves and disappear.
Volunteering with the turtles gave me so much. I learnt an incredible amount about them but, more than that, I gained an insight into a part of the world I knew little about. I also spent time with an amazing group of young people who are all dedicated to conservation and who have a deep love of nature and a determination to make the world better for every creature. It was inspiring. Personally, I deepened my love of nature and my commitment to conservation. And, as for the sand, yes, it was soft, but I managed. I’m so glad I did.