🐢 The Science of Hope

Hi 👋

The first thing to move is a little nudge of sand. Then, a small dip appears to move on the beach, then a crack, and eventually, a head no bigger than a thumbnail pushes itself up into the cool air, eyes opening and seeing the night sky for the first time. Behind it comes many others, each scrambling over one another's shells, a whole nest surfaces together.

A green turtle nest holds somewhere between 80 and 150 eggs. They've lain buried for up to two and a half months, and now they hatch almost all at once. They come up at night, because the sand is cooler and they may have some luck against the hunters amongst the shadows of darkness. But not every hunter sleeps. Dogs, birds and crabs work the beach, cars drive along a nearby road, threats are everywhere.

A hatchling's mother isn't there to protect it, in fact, sea turtles give their young no care at all. She dug the nest, laid her eggs, covered them over and went back to the sea months ago. The hatchling is alone and independent from day one.

So, it has to find the way on its own, and it does. It heads for the lowest, brightest horizon, which on a wild beach is the open sea, with a faint shine glimmering under the night sky. Flippers that have never touched water intuitively know to pull itself across the sand towards something it has never seen before.

It is an incredible spectacle. In 2011, travelling in Palawan in the Philippines, I happened to be there one morning when a nest hatched. Local women gathered them into buckets, away from the predators, and I helped carry them down towards the water. It was crazy how they all knew which way the sea was, even in the bucket. When we turned the bucket round to face the other way, the baby turtles turned too. The urge to help them along their journey is so very, very strong.

These days the advice is to let them do that crawl themselves rather than get involved, because the crawl seems to wake something up in them, maybe even help them learn the beach as home.

Back on the beach, a lucky hatchling will reach the wet sand, then tumble into the first wave, and start swimming. It hardly stops for the first 24 hours, paddling hard to get clear of the shallows, where more predators wait.

And then it disappears.

When Archie Carr began studying turtles in the 1950s, he found they swam way out from the beach and turned up again years later, half-grown, feeding near the coast. It took until recent times with modern technology, to add tiny tracking tags, showing exactly where they go: far offshore, drifting among floating rafts of seaweed, eating, hiding and slowly growing.

Growing up takes a green turtle 20 to 50 years. Half a lifetime at sea, nearly all of it trying to stay out of sight.

And then, if she's one of the very few, a female turns for home. She comes back to the beach where she hatched. Scientists have a theory that she may remember the magnetic signature of that beach, carried in her body after all those years. But that is still a theory, the truth is, we don't really know. It is one of Earth's beautiful mysteries.

One night she hauls herself up out of the surf, no doubt feeling her own weight, and drags herself up the sand. She digs. She lays her eggs into the dark, covers them, and goes back to the sea. She does it knowing that she'll never meet her young either.

About one in every thousand hatchlings lives long enough to do this. You can see how fragile the reproduction and therefore survival of this species is.

Writer and conservationist, Archie Carr, spent his life on a turtle beach. In 1956, he wrote a book about them, The Windward Road. A stranger read it and was so moved that he gathered friends into what he called the Brotherhood of the Green Turtle, which became the first organisation in the world set up to protect sea turtles.

This week, WWF published its Living Planet Report. Since 1970, the wildlife populations scientists monitor have fallen by 73% on average. That number is very difficult to swallow, a real weight in the chest.

And yet WWF called the report The Science of Hope.

Part of the reason for that is turtles. The green turtle has moved off the Endangered list to a status of Least Concern, after about 50 years of work, across roughly 80 countries. Though that work isn't finished, and some regional populations are still under threat, it is still a real recovery.

In a 2005 study at Carr's own beach, Tortuguero, nest counts there found green turtle nests rose more than five-fold between 1971 and 2003, making it one of the two largest green turtle nesting beaches in the world. With an animal this slow to grow and reproduce, protection has to run for decades even before any impact shows.

Carr died in 1987. He never got to find out if his efforts worked.

What created the recovery was mostly quite ordinary things done by a lot of people. Folk guarded nesting beaches, eggs and the females who came ashore. Local programmes cut hunting. Bans stopped the trade. Fishing nets were fitted with escape hatches, so a turtle caught inside could swim free. Year after year, people kept watch over beaches for young turtles and maybe, just maybe, they got to see them return.

Louise McRae, of the Zoological Society of London, leads the research behind the report's figures. As she puts it, "behind every global statistic is evidence of wildlife populations rebounding and habitats recovering."

I can think of each Salt letter like a baby turtle. Once I release them, I really don't know what's going to happen next. They're out in the sea. I quite like the mystery of not knowing. But like the mother who returns from sea, the replies I receive are always such a delight, and new ideas are soon hatching.

How did this letter feel for you? What stayed? Was it the shocking headline figure from the report or did you find a short moment of hope here?

Talk soon,

Rob

PS. Of course you want to spend five minutes on your lunch break watching five minutes of David Attenborough narrating the turtle's dramatic sprint across a beach: watch it here.