Sea Turtle Stories – Episode 4

Minnie: Andrea is a Professor of Universal Studies at Flame University in India and a sea turtle biologist originally from Australia. She is widely published across many fascinating and diverse aspects of sea turtle conservation, such as hatchling dispersal, embryo development and fish’s ecological knowledge about sea turtles, and she even undertook her PhD looking into the fungal invasion of sea turtle eggs. Her most current research focuses on sea turtle hatchery management practices in South Asia, outcomes of sea turtle and fisher interactions and the social dimensions of conservation. So without further ado, let’s dive into today’s episode.

Minnie: Welcome and really thank you so much for being here, Andrea. It’s really nice to meet you. 

Andrea: Thanks, Minnie. Thanks very much for having me. Not at all. 

Minnie: So we would really love to pick your brains today about some of your current research into hatcheries and hatchery management and how they impact conservation efforts. We think our listeners would be really fascinated to hear about this because I think it’s something that a lot of people will come across, even if they’re not necessarily obviously in a conservation field or working with animals. They’re quite likely to potentially come across sea turtle hatcheries when maybe they’re on holiday.

So for our listeners who may not be aware of the term, would you be able to explain to us what a hatchery actually is?

Andrea: Yeah, at its simplest, a hatchery is just a structure either on a beach or very close to a sea turtle nesting beach, which protects eggs. So it’s usually got some sort of fence, which may be made out of a really simple material like palm fronds or shade cloth or old fishing net. Sometimes they’re more permanent structures like concrete. It’s a safe place that eggs can be moved to if the threats on the nesting beach are too high.

Minnie: So we’re sort of taking them out of the hole that the mother turtle has dug and moving them to a separate area. So what is the basis, I guess, for using a hatchery as opposed to leaving them there?

Andrea: So first of all, we’ve got to understand that we don’t need to protect every single egg. Like if a sea turtle population has got really high numbers, if there’s no threats at other stages so that the population size is stable or it’s even increasing, we don’t necessarily have to move the eggs to a more safe location.

Because eggs that might die in the natural nest on the beach, eggs that might get eaten by predators or hatchlings that might get eaten by predators, they actually play a really important role in the natural functioning of the beach as well. There are other animals that live on the beach which rely on eggs and hatchlings for nutrients as well as the hatchlings when they crawl across the beach and go into the sea. So it’s only if the threats are really, really high or if it’s a really vulnerable population, maybe it’s regarded as endangered or the threats to other life stages are really high, that we might need to protect eggs.

But the sort of threats that they might experience on the beach include predators, which I just mentioned, and those might be anything from crabs to ants to flies or dogs or wild animals such as large lizards such as goannas or foxes. The other things that eggs might be vulnerable to are tidal wash, so very high tides or storm surges, especially during cyclones, which might come up and erode the nest out of the beach or flood the eggs so that they’ll actually drown. 

And then in some parts of the world where there might be illegal take of eggs, potentially eggs might need to be protected against that as well.

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Minnie: It’s really interesting. I think it’s one of those quite emotive topics, but I think it’s really important that from a biological and conservation perspective, we do stress that sea turtles do 

form a very important part of the marine food web. So yes, not every egg needs to be protected.

Not all of them are necessary to remove. We obviously have a lot of factors that a mother sea turtle is thinking of when she is choosing where to lay her eggs. Do we have to replicate that as much as possible? What do we have to do when we actually take them from where they were and put them in a hatchery? 

Andrea: Yes, so when people are building hatcheries and some hatcheries are operated or overseen by the government, like the equivalent of the forest department or the national parks, some hatcheries are operated by NGOs or by volunteer groups. So they’re going to construct artificial nests within the hatchery, which are the same depth and the same shape as the nests which are dug by the nesting sea turtle on the beach. So depending on the size of the sea turtle, some nests are deeper than others.

So green sea turtles, leatherback sea turtles dig deeper nests than what an olive ridley sea turtle or a hawksbill sea turtle might do because they’re different sizes. So we’ve got to make sure that the nest depth in the hatchery is the same as what it would be for that species when the mother sea turtle digs it, that the shape of the nest is the same. We’ve got to make sure that they’re about a metre apart because if they’re too close together, there might not be enough oxygen available in the sand to support all of the developing embryos and so that all of the carbon dioxide that the embryos are producing aren’t influencing other nests as well. We don’t want them to be exposed to more sunlight and at a higher temperature than what they experience on the natural beach, but we also don’t want them to be too shaded and experiencing a lower temperature than what they are on the beach.

We want the hatchery to be in a different place every year so that we don’t get a buildup of lots of old eggshell, lots of old eggs, because that might result in more microbes like bacteria or fungi being in the sand in the hatchery and that can lead to more disease of the eggs if the sand in the hatchery isn’t replaced every year or if the hatchery location isn’t moved every year. So there’s a lot of risks in moving the eggs. There’s a lot of factors to take into account when, where we build a hatchery and then, how we’re going to incubate the eggs within the hatchery.

Minnie: Yeah, there’s so many factors and actually we’re going to ask a little bit more about temperature there. I think by this point hopefully our listeners are aware that sea turtle eggs are temperature sex dependent. So they will become one sex at one temperature and another sex at another temperature.So how do hatcheries take on the task of trying to mitigate, like you say, being overly hot or possibly overly cool?

Andrea: Something that hatcheries have got to be careful of as well is not just that it gets too warm, but it doesn’t not only just produce more females, but the conditions aren’t getting really, really warm so that the embryos in the eggs might actually die. So they’ve got to look at the temperatures to make sure that they’re not just getting too hot because if we’ve got too many days over about 33 to 35 degrees Celsius, some of the eggs can actually die and we’ll see that in natural nests as well. 

Some beaches are naturally cooler than others. Some beaches are naturally warmer than others. And so what hatchery owners can do or hatchery operators can do is look at what’s the natural sex ratio coming off their beach. So it may be that their beach naturally produces more male hatchlings than other beaches.So they should try and create conditions within the hatchery so that the sex ratio of hatchlings coming from the hatchery is similar to the sex ratio of hatchlings coming off the beach. We can shade part of the hatchery so we’ve got some cooler nests. We can have some nests in the hatchery exposed to more sunlight so that they’re going to produce more females from those particular nests. You can also water nests to be able to reduce the temperature a little bit. But we really want to try and mimic the conditions which are in natural nests as if they were left on the beach. 

Minnie: That’s interesting. One of the sort of pressing issues I think amongst sea turtle conservationists is the feminization of sea turtle embryos as a result of rising global temperatures and sand temperatures. We worry because girls are produced at warmer temperatures, there is a concern that some nests in some parts of the world are being produced entirely female. Do hatcheries then, do they have a potential to form like a sort of risk mitigation strategy for that? 

Andrea: So there’s potentially a number of ways that climate change induced higher temperatures could be mitigated. Some of which are naturally like sea turtle nesting is simulated by the temperature of the sea and so sea turtles begin their breeding migration to mate and then lay their eggs when the seas reach a certain temperature. So what researchers are actually looking for now is – are sea turtles starting to nest earlier? Because they’re nesting earlier, they’re sort of nesting around the same temperature as they have been historically.

They’re not necessarily waiting until the hottest part of, let’s say, the hottest part of the year to begin nesting. So sea turtle populations themselves might be sort of offsetting or mitigating those higher temperatures naturally by nesting a little bit earlier. Nesting ahead of the really hottest part of the summer.

So yes hatchery, apart from that hatcheries could potentially be used to moderate nest temperatures. But we can also do that naturally on beaches as well without having to move the eggs. Because there’s a risk to moving eggs. So when we move eggs potentially we can jostle the embryos inside the eggs. There’s a very, very small window within which you can move eggs safely. So ideally we would move eggs within two hours of them being laid.

That’s the best time to move them. You can do it up to about six hours, but we’ve got the least amount of embryo mortality if we can move them within about two hours. So if we can’t though, you can reduce temperatures of nests if it’s needed by laying things like palm fronds over the top of nests, by having some vegetation growing behind the beach, which if it’s in the right direction that will actually shade the nests from the hottest part of the day. It depends on which orientation your beach has got in relation to the sun. Some people have been experimenting with just putting squares of white fabric over the top of a nest because that will help to reduce the temperature a little bit. Even watering, literally with sprinklers or with a watering can, watering some nests that can help to bring the temperature down a little bit as well.

Obviously if you’ve got a beach with hundreds or thousands of nests, you’re not going to be able to walk around with a watering can, to be able to reduce the temperature. But if you’ve got that many nests and you’ve got a  beach which has got lots of different habitats, some of them which are going to be hotter than the others , hopefully you’ll still have some males and some females being produced.

So there’s not really one answer to that question. It’s a really complicated question and researchers working on a beach have got to take all of this into account. We can’t just water them all or shade them all.

We’ve got to be looking at what’s the temperature in the nests, what temperature is happening, is there rain during a season because if there’s natural rainfall that’ll bring the temperature down as well. So there’s lots to take into account and what we don’t want to be doing is making everything too cool by being proactive and trying to reduce temperatures if we don’t need to. 

Minnie: Yeah, that’s really interesting actually because yes, there’s no one aspect that you can look at in isolation without thinking of the entire system.

Andrea: And it’s going to be different for every location as well. Every beach is going to have to do a little bit differently. 

Minnie:Yeah, so hatcheries are used I guess relatively widely but what metrics are we actually using to measure the success? Because obviously any conservation intervention we have to prove that it actually will help the overall efforts. 

Andrea: So what we’ll often see the media reporting is that hatcheries released 4,000 hatchlings this year. And that sounds like a lot. 4,000 baby turtles sounds like a lot of baby turtles. But if they’ve only released 4,000 hatchlings when they incubated 10,000 eggs, all of a sudden that ratio doesn’t sound quite so great. So instead of looking at the number of hatchlings, we want to look at what’s called the hatching success. How many eggs hatched to produce a hatchling? Okay, so 4,000 out of 10,000, that’s only 40%. That’s actually not that high. And it’s not just a hatching success.

We can also look at what’s called the emergent success. So how many eggs hatched to produce a hatchling that was then healthy enough to be able to dig its way out of the nest? Because some hatchlings might hatch out of the egg, but because of the way the nest is constructed or because they’re not very strong, they might not actually be able to dig from the egg mass, which it might be 40, 45 centimetres down to 60 centimetres deep in the sand, dig their way up to the top of the nest. So we’ve got to look at what proportion of the eggs hatched  or what proportion of the eggs hatched to produce the hatchling that was healthy enough to dig to the top of the nest.

Most of the time, those two percentages are pretty close to each other, but that’s what researchers and scientists are going to be looking at. So we can also look at the sex ratio. We can also look at how fit those hatchlings are.

How quickly do they run down the beach? How quickly are they able to swim? If they get turned over, how quickly are they able to turn themselves back the right way and continue crawling? But the main metrics would be, the main measures would be hatching success and emergent success. 

Minnie: Yeah, I think that and also I suppose it varies. So in my experience, when I was working in the Maldives, we did not have hatcheries, but we did have monitoring of sea turtle nests.And in some areas of our beach, we would have a hatching success of like 98%. So of the eggs that actually were laid, 98% of them were able to grow and emerge, which is a really incredible ratio. Obviously, some parts of the world actually naturally have much lower hatching success than that.

So I guess we also must really be aware of what a natural nest would have achieved had it not been moved. So we must also have to have some kind of monitoring of the sort of in-situ eggs of the naturally laid eggs and remaining nests. We must have to have some information about that as well?

Andrea: Yeah, we do. Because, if we’re taking the risk of moving eggs into a hatchery and saying, okay, this conservation area, this protected hatchery is going to mean we produce more hatchlings than what would happen if we left them naturally on the beach where the nesting turtle laid them, then we want the hatching success and the emergent success from a hatchery to be higher than what it is on the natural beach. Because if it’s about the same, or sometimes it can even be lower, then we have to look at what are the hatcheries doing that they’re not producing so many more hatchlings? If we’re not producing more hatchlings, then we might be better off leaving them where the turtle laid them originally. 

Minnie: Especially because hatchery management must be quite a labor intensive process.

So it really has to be scientifically proven to be worth it, I guess, for us to be putting a huge amount of investment into it. Because there’s a lot of personnel, a lot of physical effort, a lot of financial input, I imagine, for some of these hatcheries. So we actually must be able to prove that it’s going to improve things.

But yes, like you said, there’s probably some areas where we know there are pitfalls of hatcheries, like you’ve mentioned. There can be some things that we can actually do wrong, which can actually worsen the outcomes compared to if we had stayed away. In what ways could we actually worsen the outcome for these guys? You’ve mentioned a few, like I suppose disease, being weaker, possibly some of these hatchlings not being as healthy.

Andrea: Yes, yeah. Or just not having as many hatchlings or make eggs hatch to produce hatchlings. So if we take too long to move the eggs after they’re laid, like I said, it’s best to move them within two hours, but it can be up to six hours.

If you move eggs 12 hours after they’re laid, or 24 hours after they’re laid, just the movement of those eggs can actually kill the embryo inside the eggs. So eggs that might have hatched where they were left originally are not going to hatch if they move to a hatchery. So we want to try and move them within a really short window. We want to make sure that the nest depth and shape within the hatchery is as close to what the turtle would dig when she was constructing her own nest. We want to make sure that the nests are about a metre apart so that they’ve got lots of oxygen available and they’re not producing too much carbon dioxide that’s going to decrease the hatching of nests which might be too close to them. 

So there’s lots of things that we can do in relation to that to make sure that we get as many eggs  hatching as possible.

Minnie: It’s really interesting. You mentioned before about predation. So that’s quite a big one,I think, for people, especially for members of the public. Perhaps that’s something that  they’ve probably seen, we’ve all watched the documentaries of turtles being plucked off the beach by various sort of birds or crabs or any loads of different animals who do predate on sea turtles. Can this be a problem actually and can we make that worse? Because hatcheries, like you said, are very enclosed and they tend to be over very small areas compared to the actual beach. Can predators learn that that’s actually a place that they can go preferentially?

Andrea: Yes, they most definitely can. And it’s not just the terrestrial predators that we see on land, so it’s not just birds or crabs, let’s say. But as soon as the hatchlings enter the water, they’re snack sized. So they’re like a bite size for lots of fish, small sharks, and other predators which are in the water.

And so if hatcheries are releasing hatchlings, lots of hatchlings in the same place every day, or if a hatchery is located in the same place, it creates almost like a feeding station. And so predators know that around dusk or around dawn when the hatchlings are being released on a schedule from a hatchery, that if they’re sitting at this place in the water, they’re not going to have to swim too far to be able to get a nice meal of hatchlings.

So ideally, hatcheries would let hatchlings go down to the water as they come out of the nest and not hold them to release them at specific times of the day, either as per the convenience of the people who work at the hatchery, maybe they only check the hatchery to see what hatchlings have come out at dusk and then again at midnight and then again at dawn.

But ideally, hatchlings would be able to leave the hatchery whenever they come out of the nest, go down to water so that hatchlings into the water are all spread out over time. And then from year to year, we want to be moving the position of the hatchery so that predators don’t learn that this is where there’s always going to be hatchlings hitting the water.

Minnie: It’s amazing also how quickly animals learn stuff like that.

Andrea: They most definitely do. I mean, even within the same nesting season, you can let the hatchlings sort of, you can collect the hatchlings and then instead of releasing them in front of the hatchery, carry them a hundred metres down the beach, just so that they then crawl down the beach, which they need to do naturally, but they’re entering the water at a different location each time. And so the predators aren’t all sitting there waiting for them in that same really narrow stretch of beach.

Minnie: That’s something you just mentioned there that I wanted to talk about, which is, so one of the, I think, potential downsides that people will come across with hatcheries is what they do with the babies after they have emerged. I’ve certainly received a lot of messages about it, people sort of being like, oh, I helped release a baby turtle today. You know, they were all waiting and then we all released them in the water.

And that makes a sea turtle conservationist’s heart drop a little bit because like you say, they have to run down the beach. It’s really important for their development of their mental map of the world, of their sort of magnetic imprint on the world. But what is the consensus for kind of holding hatchlings back? So we know that some hatcheries will hold the hatchlings until a certain time.What is the consensus and what are the pitfalls of doing that?

Andrea: So for conservation purposes, we really want hatchlings to be able to dig their way out   of the nest, and then as they would do naturally, run down the beach straight away and go straight into the water. So if we’re holding hatchlings for really long periods of time, whether they put like a basket over the top of the nest or whether the hatchery might collect hatchlings and put them in a bucket, or worse, put them in a tank of water, the hatchlings are then crawling around or swimming and they’re using up really valuable energy that they need to be able to crawl quickly down the beach, but then swim quickly from the beach out into the open ocean. Because most of the predation on hatchlings happens in the water rather than on beaches. And so we want hatchlings to be able to swim as quickly as possible through those inshore waters out to deeper waters and out into what scientists call their oceanic developmental habitat, just a bigger, deeper oceanic waters, where they’re going to start feeding and start developing to become bigger turtles.

So if we’re holding them all night to be able to release at eight o’clock in the morning, nine o’clock in the morning for tourists to be able to watch, then they’re using up energy. So maybe they’re not going to be swimming as quickly or able to swim as far before they need to take a rest, and so that might actually make them more vulnerable to predators. So the general consensus is for conservation purposes, release, let as many of them go down to the water as soon as they emerge.

Hatchling releases, however, have got a really great outreach and education purpose as well. So people love what they can see. So if they can watch some hatchlings, a few hatchlings crawl down to the water and start swimming out to sea, that can have educational benefits as well.

But what we often find is after most of the hatchlings have come out of a nest and we dig up a nest to count the empty eggshell and to see if there are any hatchlings, any stragglers that got left behind, is there may be a few hatchlings which are left behind, or there may be a few hatchlings which are a little bit slower. And so if you want to do a release of hatchlings for education purposes, keeping sort of those slower hatchlings or hatchlings which maybe got trapped in tree roots or got left behind in the nest and might not have been able to dig their way out by themselves, those are the hatchlings that we suggest we release for sort of education purposes so that people can see them. 

Minnie: Okay, so yeah, so that maybe follows on to my next question, which I’ve received quite a lot of. A lot of people want to be involved, you know, where possible on conservation projects, volunteer their time, and they want to make sure they’re doing it as, you know, ethically, I guess, and as helpfully as possible. What sort of things would you say would be the kind of things that we would want to look for if perhaps we wanted to get involved in assisting with hatchery projects or volunteering time?

Andrea: So for anyone who’s looking to volunteer at either beach management programs or at hatcheries in various countries around the world. What we would be looking for would be organisations that are trying to mimic what happens naturally as much as possible in their beach management. So protecting nests on the beach, if possible, if they’ve got to be moved to a hatchery for conservation purposes, then they’re being moved as quickly as possible, that as much as possible, then when the hatchlings come out, they’re able to go down to the water as soon as possible after they come out of the nest, that lots of hatchlings aren’t kept, aren’t held for hatchling releases for tourism purposes, or they aren’t kept in tanks for a couple of days or a couple of weeks before they’re released, because there’s less evidence that that is actually a benefit for the hatchlings, and that it can actually, it uses up all of their energy because they spend all of that valuable swimming energy, swimming in a tank rather than swimming in the ocean, and they can be more vulnerable to disease if they’re kept in a tank, especially if there’s lots of hatchlings in the same small tank. But it can also change their behaviour, because if they’re kept for long periods of time, they don’t develop those strong swimming muscles, and they don’t get to use that impulse to swim against the waves, which hatchlings need when they first go out to sea, and then they may not develop the natural feeding abilities as well if they’re fed artificially in a tank for long periods of time, where they’re sort of expecting to be dropped in from above, rather than having to hunt for it and look for it when they’re out at sea as well.

So ideally, we would like hatcheries to be following natural processes as much as possible. Some hatcheries actually operate as small businesses, so they’re operating for tourism purposes. They may be incubating eggs in protected spaces where the eggs would be heavily threatened if they were left on the beach.

They might still have tanks, which have got turtles in it, but ideally for education purposes, they might be keeping turtles which have been sick, like maybe turtles are washed ashore because they’ve been sick, or they’ve been injured, maybe they’ve become tangled in nets, so they might need a recovery period, so a rescue and rehabilitation, or a turtle hospital type of exercise, or turtles that might have become entangled in fishing nets, they might have lost a flipper, and so they’d have a reduced survivorship if they were still out at sea, and so they’re there for tourists to have a look at,  so they can experience seeing some turtles at different sizes, learning more about turtles, but we’re not keeping hatchlings for those purposes.

Minnie: We do find that there’s quite a lot of evidence to suggest that hatchlings should not be retained in water after they’ve hatched, because they have a really key, that really key sort of swimming frenzy moment where they really need to use that. There’s really no demonstrative benefit to them being retained in water.

In fact, it only makes things worse before they are allowed to then get into the sea. And I think what you mentioned before is also really important, is that actually, hatcheries are sort of the last resort. We should be aiming to do everything in situ as much as possible, before we then resort to relocating a nest.

Andrea: In most places that is what would be advocated for, is that if possible, like as I said at the start, we don’t have to protect every single egg. So if, if let’s say a turtle, lays eggs like low down on the beach, where we know that high tides are going to wash over them at some times of year, you can,  instead of moving those eggs to a hatchery, you can just move those eggs higher up the beach and sort of like make another nest, dig another nest to like incubate them by themselves. They don’t always have to be moved to a hatchery.

If there are predators on the beach, there are options for putting cages and fences around individual nests to protect them against some predators. So managers of the beach should be looking at all of the different options and, and sort of understanding what works best for, for the threat that they’re trying to work against, trying to control for.

So do they need to control for that threat? What’s the best strategy? Can they leave eggs in place, protect eggs in place, move them elsewhere on the beach or, or is moving to a hatchery the best option for them? 

Minnie: Yeah. Disease, I guess, is one of those things that we don’t necessarily think about a huge amount when it comes to hatcheries. You did your PhD, I believe, on kind of, on fungal invasion of sea turtle eggs.

What kind of funguses are we seeing? What kind of big infections or issues are we seeing? 

Andrea: You’d normally see more disease amongst sea turtle eggs,  so like bacterial disease or 

bacterial sort of invasion or fungal invasion, if the sand within the hatchery, if that’s not clean. So if there’s a lot of old eggshell or old eggs from last year. Because on beaches, yeah, we have hopefully hundreds or thousands of nests building up over the years, but then you’ve got things like storms or cyclones, the tide washing over the sand, all of that sort of helps to clean the sand as such.

If a hatchery moves its location every year, we don’t find that there’s a buildup of old eggs and old eggshell within the sand. So we don’t usually have problems with disease. For hatcheries, which might be permanent structures, what they can do is replace the sand every year.

So they literally will dig out that sand from the hatchery. Maybe the hatchery is a concrete structure or it’s a permanent structure. They can dig out all the sand down to about a metre depth and then put that on the beach and then replace it with fresh sand down to about that metre in depth. That’s very labour intensive though. In some countries, they’re trialling whether or not they can soak the sand in seawater and you’d have to do that a period of time before you started putting eggs in there because you don’t want the eggs incubating in sand which has too much salt from seawater in it as well. But soaking everything in seawater a couple of times can help to reduce the number of bacteria and fungi which are living in the sand as well.

Minnie: Is that something that we ever see naturally, like specifically olive ridleys, for example, have their arribadas where they nest in high density, tens of thousands of turtles in the same place in the same time period. Do we ever see that problem in a more natural way? Does the sheer amount of turtles nesting on one beach in a place sometimes  lead to infection as well or does it actually control itself very well with all of the weather conditions? 

Andrea: It’s a little bit of both. Certainly, you can get a build-up of a lot of organic matter, so a lot of just dead eggs, dead eggshells, potentially dead hatchlings as well or embryos in the beach because the turtles are digging into each other’s nests.

But then those sort of beaches, you tend to have the beach being cleaned by tidal surges or storm surges. I mean, beaches are really dynamic, so sand gets taken away, fresh sand gets put there, so that can happen sometimes. But even with some of the islands I worked in during my PhD, which were on the Great Barrier Reef, there’s a lot of nesting seabirds, which means you get a lot of seabird guano, seabird feces, which is adding to those beaches. So they’ve got a really high nutrient load and we saw more microbes living on those beaches than what you would on a beach where there’s just not tens of thousands of seabirds also sharing space with sea turtle nests as well. So there can be naturally high nutrient loads on some areas, but then the beaches self-clean as well just through natural climate events or natural weather events. 

Minnie: Generally, most things tend to keep themselves pretty well under control, even despite the thousands of turtles doing it at the same time.

We actually don’t even know, do we, quite fully what the mother sea turtles are doing to decide where their nest is going. We think they can understand the density of the sand and the moisture content and all of that sort of thing, but actually there are still quite a lot of mysteries about how the female is deciding exactly where to go. So it’s difficult for us to also decide that.

Andrea: Yeah, it is one of the questions that we still don’t have a definitive answer for, is how does a sea turtle choose their specific nesting site? But they definitely have a way of sensing like, this is a good nesting beach through currents, which allow them the hatchlings to disperse, the sand conditions. It’s got good habitat, which is just offshore for turtles in between when they lay their eggs to be able to hang out and quietly get the next clutch of eggs ready. Once they start digging with their bag flippers, they’re looking for sand, which is going to hold together, that’s not going to cave in. There’s not too many tree roots or anything else, which is they can’t dig through and then the hatchlings may not be able to dig out of. So yeah, we know a lot, but we don’t know everything about that yet. Very well.

Minnie: Very well! There’s a paper you’ve recently published regarding hatcheries across India and sort of assessing the best practices. It seems to be actually that the hatching success of the hatcheries was pretty much comparable to the hatching success in situ, which is great. 

For a hatchery to be, I suppose, a conservationally beneficial practice – do we really have to have it be better than the in-situ nest or is it sufficient to have comparable levels or do we sort of need to be aiming for significantly better outcomes than if we were to leave them? 

Andrea: I mean, theoretically, we would want the proportion of eggs that hatch and produce hatchlings to be much, much higher in a hatchery than what it is on the beaches where the eggs are being collected from. Otherwise there’s a lot of human resources and financial resources which are going into those hatcheries. And because hatcheries are a very visible sign of conservation, like you can’t miss a hatchery if it’s on the beach and you’re in that location. But that’s not necessarily the life stage where most of our conservation effort and conservation finances should be directed. Because if we’re producing lots and lots of hatchlings, that’s great. But if we’re also having lots of turtles being impacted by interactions with fisheries or by ghost gear or by other threats, by loss of habitat, by loss of feeding habitat, by loss of nesting habitat, then that effort and that energy and those finances might be better directed at those more vulnerable life stages.

Minnie: Yeah. Some conservation efforts are a lot less sort of publicly facing or a lot less sort of obvious, but actually are more important in many ways. Something that Olive Ridley Project is really passionate about, is the kind of local community at large and the engagement with the local community.

And you’ve sort of mentioned obviously across these hatcheries across India. How do they fit into sort of locally led models of sea turtle conservation? Is that something that’s quite a big part of the hatcheries that you’ve come across? 

Andrea: Yeah. So in India it sort of varies from state to state.

In some states most of the hatcheries are operated by the Forest Department, so it’s sort of it’s state government. In other states it could be that there’s lots of NGOs and there’s lots of local communities which are involved. So in Maharashtra, the state that I live in, there are actually a number of different communities who have established turtle festivals, where it’s a community-based conservation model, where yes they have a hatchery and they’re working with the Forest Department in that regard, but they’re promoting sort of the hatchlings that are naturally emerging from the nests within the hatcheries.

They advertise the dates around which the hatchlings are most likely to come out because hatchlings don’t work to strict calendars and strict schedules. So I’ve been to a couple of these turtle festivals where you travel to the village and you’re staying in a homestay, so people have got, literally they’re opening up their homes. You’re staying there, so you’re supporting local livelihoods.

You go to the hatchery at dusk and you sort of stay for a couple of hours hoping that hatchlings will come out, but they may not and there’s nothing that the hatchery can do about that. And if they don’t come out at that time, you sit on the beach at night and you enjoy being on the beach at night or during the daytime at dawn if the hatchlings haven’t come out at sort of pre-dawn or the dawn hours. Then you go for a walk on a beach and explore everything which is there and enjoy being in this beautiful environment as well.

But the communities themselves are giving a proportion of the profits that they make from the homestays and that the tourists are bringing in. They’re putting that into conservation. It’s a very community-driven initiative. All of the homestays make sure that they’re charging the same rate so that there’s not sort of this competitiveness and it’s a model of conservation which is really working in those locations and that could potentially be used by other areas because it’s got conservation at the heart, but it’s also got community-based conservation as the driving force and then local livelihoods as well. So that local people are invested in the sea turtle populations, in the conservation of the sea turtles and in supporting people who come to enjoy these beautiful locations which they may not necessarily visit, as well as hopefully see some sea turtle hatchlings.

Minnie: That’s really cool. That sounds really amazing. What a really interesting initiative. If members of the public are really interested in trying to get involved and see these incredible things, it is actually still a good exercise though in realising that if it can be that well controlled, it may not be quite the most ethically approachable option.

If you’re going to be guaranteed to see hatchlings and be able to handle them or see them in the water, that may actually be a little bit of a question mark because if they’re allowed to do their own thing, they definitely don’t do it when you need them to do it or want them to do it or when you’re waiting for them to do it. With wildlife you may not necessarily see what you want, but if you do get to see it, it’s extra special.

Andrea: You’re very fortunate. Yes. Yeah. And that’s actually a really great way to think about it, that if you are guaranteed something, you start thinking about, well, how are they able to guarantee it? So they are potentially with holding something.

And so the turtle festivals that I’ve been to, we didn’t actually get to see hatchlings, but the hatchery sort of explains what’s happening. You still get to see the conservation. You still learn a lot about sea turtles and you can still have a really great experience.

Beaches at Australia that I’ve worked at and I’ve also visited as a tourist, so I get to see both sides of the experience. It may be that you are waiting for hours until hatchlings come out. So you might arrive after dark and then you’re waiting through until 1 or 2 a.m. to be able to see hatchlings.

So there’s all different models that different beach management programs can use and different conservation initiatives can use that, it doesn’t have to be that everyone does the same thing. It depends on resources and what the threats are at the local beach. And if there are threats, do eggs need to be moved to a hatchery or not?

Minnie: That’s really cool. I would love to actually go to one of these festivals  It sounds like something we should be definitely supporting. And there’s maybe one of the questions actually that kind of follows on from that, might not be related to hatching, but local knowledge, I think, historically been quite an untapped resource, like we haven’t always supported or kind of understood the local knowledge that a lot of people will have over the ecosystems and over the animals that they share the land with. And is there anything that has surprised you about what people have known about sea turtles and their lifestyle and without, you know, not necessarily being scientists, not being trained, maybe, but they have just incredible information. Have you come across something like that in your journeys?

Andrea: So we’ve been interviewing fishers in India, in the state where I live, about where are they seeing sea turtles, what species of sea turtles, what size of sea turtles to get an understanding because they’re out there every day. And so it would sort of save researchers from having to go out and do surveys. So what they know doesn’t necessarily surprise me because they’re out there every day. And so they’re going to see a lot and they’re very observant people and they’re interacting with marine wildlife all the time as well. But what has surprised me is how willing fishers are to share their experiences and their knowledge, especially because I work with university students and every time I’ve spoken about going out and doing interviews with fishers to sort of learn about what they know, people have said to me, oh, they won’t talk to women or they’re not likely to want to talk to you. And they’ve always been incredibly open and incredibly willing to speak with us and share their experiences and share their knowledge.

And they’re quite intrigued about why we’re interested in their stories and their observations as well. Yeah. So I guess fishers sometimes get a bad reputation for doing all the wrong things.

And that is most definitely not always the case. 

Minnie: That’s really interesting. Yeah. Actually, people are invariably incredibly generous with their knowledge and their understanding. I was always impressed in the Maldives. I had not lived in the Maldives before, so I was very privileged to be able to live there and learn from Maldivians and the ways that a turtle would nest.

And they would just tell me, oh, she’ll be back in nine days. I’m like, how on earth could you possibly know that? But they’re just like, nope, she will be. And they had seen it so many times.

They’d kind of had this really incredible lived experience. And they were always right. Almost always right. There’s so much to learn from the people that we’re lucky enough to work with.

Minnie: I have one final question, maybe, which I always like to ask people as we sort of draw this to a close. What sort of advice then would you give to people who want to get into sea turtle conservation?

Andrea: Well, because I work a lot with students, undergraduate students at university, so I spend a lot of time talking to them. But I think traditionally we tend to think of people involved in conservation as people who’ve studied biology or zoology. Whereas in reality, people who’ve done, who are good at mathematical modelling, people who are interested in developing technology, such as temperature probes or using drones, people who might be into computer science, so they’re designing technology. All of those people can really contribute in an incredible way to conservation of sea turtles and other species as well.

So it’s not just the traditional biologists. It’s social scientists, it’s economists, it’s psychologists. There’s all the ways that these different disciplines can help us understand people’s relationship with nature and people’s purchasing power, changing behaviours.

All of that is super important to conservation science. It’s not just the biologists. So that is what I say all the time to undergraduate students.

But for people who are already in careers or who have got different careers, there’s amazing ways of being able to contribute to conservation as well through citizen science, through taking photographs of animals and then submitting them through the different citizen science platforms. that can really help us collect a lot of information from a lot of different people as well. And all of that is incredibly valuable for researchers who are working within different areas of sea turtle conservation or other wildlife.

Minnie: Yeah, that’s something we at the Olive Ridley Project do quite a lot of, is we have a quite large database of sea turtle photo identification. When I was working with the guests on the resort, I’d say, if you’re out snorkelling, the amount of information that you can share with us by taking a photo is actually incredible. The contribution that you’ll have to our understanding of that population can’t be overstated. So take those photos.

Yeah, there really is a scope for so many people with so many different skill sets to get involved. 

I think we’re going to have to end it there, unfortunately, even though I think I could talk forever. thank you so much for answering all of our questions. I think we really have been able to gain a much deeper understanding of hatchery and hatchery management and sea turtle conservation at large. So thank you so much for sharing all of your knowledge with us.

Andrea: It was great chatting with you. Thanks very much, Minnie.

Minnie: No, thank you. I would love to spend much more time learning, but um, I have to let you go. And thank you so much to everyone listening.

Minnie: Thank you all, to everyone who is listening. We would love to hear your thoughts, so please do leave us a review and let us know.

If you would like to learn more about sea turtles and ORP’s work, please visit our website oliveridleyproject.org, where you can also support our work by naming and adopting a sea turtle, adopting one of our sea turtle patients or making a donation.

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We’ll see you for our next episode, and until then, stay turtley awesome.