Costa Rica’s Incredible Olive Ridley Sea Turtle Arribada
She was just 15 years old as she drifted offshore in the warm, tropical eastern Pacific off the small beach called Ostional in a land that, more than 500 years earlier, Christopher Columbus had discovered and named “Costa Rica”, the “rich coast.” She was an olive ridley sea turtle.
The nearly daily afternoon tropical rains of December had slipped away as the marine turtle waited expectantly. The moon was in its final quarter and, though she did not know why, it was having an effect on her.
A dozen meters away, a second olive ridley sea turtle joined her, followed by a dozen, then hundreds, thousands, and soon tens of thousands, all waiting quietly. For eons the moon has graced the earth with its timeless phases that affect the world’s tides-and today it was bringing her ashore this night, just as it had led her forebears to ancestral nesting beaches for more than 100,000,000 years.
Just a few months earlier, this marine turtle was swimming way out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Indeed, in the first week of March an ocean tramper ship had passed her more than 2,500 miles offshore. On that same day, the hundreds of thousands now alongside her had been distributed across more than a million square kilometers. But, life is forever mysterious and this year was no exception.
Though food was plentiful far out in the Pacific, something was stirring inside her. She and hundreds of thousands like her felt the same need to return to Costa Rica. They had to go back to where they had arrived.
Now, as she waited in the soft moonlight, she was ready. Over the thousands of miles she had swum she had been bred by several different males in the clear tropical waters because, somehow, they, too, were being affected by something unseen, a force primeval. It was something so compelling that it had been bringing her kind back to the same Costa Rica beach since before the first dinosaur.
The marine turtle was somehow returning to the very beach where had hatched in 1995. No one knows how a Pacific marine turtle finds the exact beach where it started life. Ostional Beach is only a few hundred meters in length. Now part of Costa Rica’s Ostional National Wildlife Refuge, it is almost certainly the most important olive ridley marine turtle nesting site on earth. Incredibly, the year this turtle hatched, about half a million females had come ashore to nest here in massive “arribadas.”
Unfortunately, our sea turtle’s mother will not join her to nest at Ostional this year even though for 23 years, she had been part of massive Costa Rica arribadas annually. Not long ago, she drowned in an illegal shrimping net on her way back to the ancient nesting grounds. It was a needless waste since it could have been avoided by the simple use of an internationally required, but typically ignored, law requiring a turtle escape device. Thousands more were destroyed in what is politely called “incidental catch” by long line fishermen who refuse to use larger hooks that would prevent tragedy to this ancient creature. And, no one knows how many thousands were killed terribly by swallowing carelessly discarded plastic bags. And, of course, there has been the ceaseless pillaging of nests: millions of eggs from just a few small, precious beaches.
Of course, the tens of thousands of olive ridleys just offshore do not know any of this. In the tropical pale moonlight, we can see them even though they are nearly half a mile away. There are now so many gathered that it almost seems one could walk on their backs for a mile or more and never get a wet foot. We can only stand silently in wonder as they gather silently. These ancient reptiles will never know that they were here long before there was a dinosaur walking the earth. They cannot appreciate our capacity for destruction or efforts at preservation. They only know that this little stretch of beach is where they’ve always come.
Then, as quietly as they first appeared beyond the surf, as silently as they gathered, as patiently as they waited, they begin to come ashore. One turtle, a second, dozens, hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands—even more than that–lumber onto the beach and nest. All night, all day, day after day in a spectacular display of life. As timeless as the moon itself. Arribada.
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