Turtles are very touch doesn't matter if you're a man, a woman or child we all get
excited to see a turtle. It's an animal what is
not aggressive is a lovely it's a pretty animal
it's an animal what mystic you know. Yeah they might seem a little clumsy
and they may seem slow that they're so well designed it's perfect
we are in Costa Rica Central America this is in the north eastern coast in
the Caribbean side of Costa Rica I was born right here in total death in this a
island in this community it was a really isolated place that we had us to live
off what we had and so people used to do fishing in they used to go and hunt in
the jungle they used to go on strike Tortugas you know to harvest the meat
and the shell the first part Rangers had to deal with the locals because they
have been hunting and eating Turtles and turtle eggs for many generations for
centuries in fact all the species of sea turtles in the world they are threatened
at some level in Latin America no specific sea turtles are hunted if their
babies won't hatch we want to get another generation so we need as many
hatchlings as we can in the water so we can guarantee that the population will
increase
it's an app track from a premie turtle so she must be up in the vegetation
laying her eggs were studying process
this is an adult green turtle female and she's laying now and this species can
lay in average 110 eggs in each clutch and they can lay up to six times in one
season so we expect to get a good 110, 120 eggs from this, from this female
well we're really happy that we learn about conservation with the SCC with the
founder mr. rajshekhar came here and teacher us about conservation and we're
really happy that we change our mentality you know. The STC is the
longest ongoing research organization with sea turtles in the world we've been
working here since 1959 as a conservation organization what we do is
basically evaluate the population status we want to see if the populations are
increasing decreasing and how they're hatching success is in the beach and how
good a place this is for the sea turtles to come and lay their eggs we have a
research assistant program basically we pick around eight to ten people from all
around the world usually biology students or master's students so these
guys take two, three months out of their lives to come here and this is the
perfect place for that. I think just sea turtles in general are just such an
amazing marine creature and there's so much draw to them for tourism you need
ecotourism and people just love them in general and so using the sea turtles to
educate on conservation is a perfect opportunity. When I see those baby
turtles just emerging from the nest it's breathtaking you know there's not many
people to have had this privilege to see this amazing act you know I think coming
here was just what I wanted to do because I get a talk with tourists I got
educate I get to work personally with the turtles and the hatchlings which is
always a great shot and I think just being close with the local community and
tourists that come here just to see the turtles is what I really wanted to do
Tourist activity in Tortuguero I think have been a blessing yes in many ways
want more than 120,000 tourists from different countries coming to Tortuguero
to have the opportunity to see turtles lay eggs on the beach you know because
of that we have electricity we have water system we have a school we
have a clinic of the social security and learning about eco-tourism with the
organization. The tourists may not realize that when they come to
Tortuguero they're actually helping a conservation effort the money they're
paying all the guides they hire and everything they do from the moment they
get on the boat to the moment they leave is helping a community survive on
different means and prevent these people to go back to their traditional customs
of killing sea turtles.
Basically we're going to do an excavation of a nest that
we mark a couple of months ago we do this in order to evaluate the hatching
success of the nest in this case it was relocated how to build nest the
Hawksbill is the most endangered species of sea turtle this is a really
successful nest as we can see we saw a bunch of tracks and now we see a lot of
empty shells that's a good sign. There you go check it out
we have a live one. When you get a nesting site like this
one when you see thousands of turtles coming out it's really really something
else