Vaarey

Vaarey, meaning “rain” in Dhivehi, is an adult male olive ridley turtle found with his neck entangled in a cement mesh bag by the Soneva Jani resort staff in Noonu Atoll. He was also missing his left front flipper from a previous trauma which had fully healed, and had ingested fishing line, which was coming off his mouth at admission

Sarah, ORP’s sea turtle biologist based at the resort, helped to carefully retrieve him from the water and promptly called our veterinary team for an assessment. Once it was decided that Vaary needed veterinary care, Soneva Jani quickly built him a custom-made box for safe transport and transferred him by speedboat to the Marine Turtle Rescue Centre in Baa Atoll.

Following a comprehensive health assessment, we diagnosed Vaarey with anaemia and a gastrointestinal condition. Due to the ingested a fishing line, the veterinary team is closely monitoring him as he is still in very critical condition.

12 May 2024
Vaarey’s condition was quite critical for a couple of weeks but, fortunately, we were able to remove the fishing line he had ingested, and he started recovering from his gastrointestinal and anaemic conditions. Vaarey has been eating very well and his ligature injury around the neck has been healing fast under cold laser therapy sessions.

9 June 2024
Vaarey has made incredible strides this month. He began to dive all the way to the bottom of his tank only a few days after starting on Targeted External Weight Therapy (TEWT). While Vaarey’s diving still requires some practice and fine tuning, this was an incredible step in the right direction. Vaarey also has a great appetite, eating all of his food from the bottom of his tank. He is steadily gaining weight well and his anaemia has now almost completely resolved.

7 July 2024
Vaarey continues to impress the team with his consistent diving skills. We have discontinued his Targeted External Weight Therapy since he is showing good diving behaviour, as well as resting and feeding from the bottom of his tank successfully. We are now focussing on providing him with more environmental enrichment to encourage him to spend more time submerged and fine-tune his diving abilities.

15 July 2024
The veterinary team could not be more thrilled to reach this milestone: Vaarey was cleared today for release. He has been quite consistent with his diving skills, foraging for his food from the bottom of his tank, interacting with the environmental enrichment devices we placed in his enclosure and resting on the bottom.

21 July 2024
Vaarey was released fitted with a satellite tag from the beach of Coco Palm Dhuni Kolhu today! Stay tuned to find out where he is heading!

11 August 2024
Our initial tracking data shows that Vaarey, after his release, was quick to leave the Maldivian archipelago, but he seemed to be keeping close to the atolls rather than heading straight out into the open ocean.

22 August 2024
Since his release about a month ago, Vaarey first stayed very close to the Maldivian archipelago before making headway into the open ocean. He headed north and went around Haa Aifu atoll, where he finally left the archipelago and travelled southeast into the Indian Ocean. So far, he’s travelled an astonishing 870 km and averaging at about 26 km/day (or averaging at a steady 1.1 km/hr)! Many of his dives were shallow (less than 40 meters), but he managed to reach the maximum depth the satellite tags can detect, which is somewhere between 276–300 m.

27 September 2024
On September 8th, Vaarey swam right up to a spot 20 km off Sri Lanka’s shore, and then proceeded to head south. After five days of swimming, he turned east and started to head closer to the shoreline. We believe Vaarey will skirt around Sri Lanka until he reaches the eastern shore, and then head off into the Bay of Bengal, returning there to forage. Since Vaarey’s release, he has travelled a total of nearly 1,600 km! He is still moving at a steady pace of 1.16 km/hr, or 27 km a day. Most of his dives are still quite shallow (less than 40 m), with only a few going down to 276–300 m. He also does not appear to be staying in any single place for very long, this means that he was probably eating on the go! We’re very keen to see whether our predictions of Vaarey going to the Bay of Bengal will come true.