Leatherback Turtles at Grande Riviere

Grande Riviere, the morning of Monday 27th April 2009. Grande Riviere is just west of the north east corner of Trinidad.

Throughout most of the West Indies there will be places advertising "Turtle Beach". The more enterprising ones have got the integrated tourism service working -- you turn up, book into the hotel, then during the night when a leatherback turtle crawls up the beach to dig a nest, a guide will come and get you.

At Grande Riviere however there are enough turtles that, during the season, there are routinely a couple on the beach even in broad daylight. We booked into the Mt Plaisir hotel and ate in the restaurant. The guide for the evening turned up at about 10pm. I'd wandered out of the restaurant earlier to let my night vision develop, and realised there were turtles every few yards in all directions.

During the season, a female turtle will lay six to eight times, about ten days apart, sixty to a hundred and twenty eggs. A quarter of the eggs are unfertilised; they're about an inch in diameter and are laid first and last, to provide thermal insulation and/or air space in the nest. Fertilised eggs are about two inches in diameter. These take sixty days to hatch, and once hatching begins -- which can occur while laying continues -- the public aren't allowed on that beach at night. Being on the beach at night from 6pm to 6am at Grande Riviere requires a permit which costs TT$65 per person per night; during the day, it's a public beach.

With so many nests, a turtle digging a nest will often disturb an existing nest. There are dogs and birds hanging about on the beach to steal dislodged eggs. Handling dislodged eggs is fine; once out of the nest, they can't be put back because the even temperature they require has been lost, and there is a risk of carrying bacterial contamination into the nest by returning an egg. [However: interfering with the turtles, killing or eating, removing eggs etc caries stiff penalties -- TT$20000 fine, six months jail, and so on.]

Only the females emerge from the water to lay. Nobody knows where the males are. There is one school of thought that says they don't have satnav, will not ask people for directions, and are all hopelessly lost somewhere in the middle of the ocean. There is another school of though that they do have satnav, and are all in a vast turtle pub somewhere.