Tonight we saw a giant sea turtle (tortuga) crawl up onto a beach just south of Tulum under a gorgeous full moon.

The night began with Ana and I crashed out on some beach chairs below our camping site around 10:00 PM, enjoying the cool air and the sounds of the ocean washing up on the gleaming white sand.  We noticed some activity about 100 yards away, and saw a large lump on the sand that appeared to be moving.  We walked over to investigate, and sure enough, it was a giant sea turtle crawling onto the beach to lay its eggs.  We spent the next 3 hours nearby, watching the giant tortuga lay its eggs.

From the edge of the water, the turtle crawled about 75 feet and found a spot above the water line to start digging. Over the next hour, it used its front and back legs to dig a bathtub-sized trench that was several feet deep.  Once the trench was dug, it used another part of its body to dig a cylindrical hole about 6 inches in diameter and 2 feet deep. After all this exertion, the turtle then tried to relax and start laying its eggs into the hole it made.  It spent about half an hour dropping 130 eggs into its newly dug trench.  We know the exact number of eggs because as the giant turtle began laying them, some volunteers swooped in during the darkness and started working around the turtle.  They measured her, tagged her foot with a tracking number, and then collected all the eggs shortly after she laid them.  I call the turtle volunteers “Sea Turtle Ninjas” because they came so stealthily and started working so quickly around the giant sea turtle.  They took the eggs to a hatchery where they will be incubated and released once they hatch in about 60 days.

Once the giant turtle laid all its eggs, it spent about 1 hour trying to cover them in sand with its huge flippers.  I felt a bit sad seeing the turtle expend so much effort to cover her eggs - she must have known that the volunteers had already taken them away.  Hopefully, somehow she might understand that her eggs stand a better chance of survival now that they’ve been taken away.

Once the turtle thought it had sufficiently covered its eggs, it started a slow journey back into the ocean.  It pulled itself a few feet at a time across the sand, and then would rest for a minute or so each time.  You could tell that the whole egg-laying process had really drained the turtle of most of its energy.  After about 20 minutes of struggling, the giant turtle finally pulled itself back down to the surf.  A wave came in and it floated up a little off the sand.  The giant turtle started paddling and soon disappeared under the moonlight.  The whole process took about 3 hours and definitely gave both of us a deeper appreciation of this truly amazing animal.

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