🐢 The Science of Hope

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The first thing to move is a little nudge of sand. Then, a small dip appears to move on the beach, then a crack, and eventually, a head no bigger than a thumbnail pushes itself up into the cool air, eyes opening and seeing the night sky for the first time. Behind it comes many others, each scrambling over one another's shells, a whole nest surfaces together.

A green turtle nest holds somewhere between 80 and 150 eggs. They've lain buried for up to two and a half months, and now they hatch almost all at once. They come up at night, because the sand is cooler and they may have some luck against the hunters amongst the shadows of darkness. But not every hunter sleeps. Dogs, birds and crabs work the beach, cars drive along a nearby road, threats are everywhere.

A hatchling's mother isn't there to protect it, in fact, sea turtles give their young no care at all. She dug the nest, laid her eggs, covered them over and went back to the sea months ago. The hatchling is alone and independent from day one.

So, it has to find the way on its own, and it does. It heads for the lowest, brightest horizon, which on a wild beach is the open sea, with a faint shine glimmering under the night sky. Flippers that have never touched water intuitively know to pull itself across the sand towards something it has never seen before.

It is an incredible spectacle. In 2011, travelling in Palawan in the Philippines, I happened to be there one morning when a nest hatched. Local women gathered them into buckets, away from the predators, and I helped carry them down towards the water. It was crazy how they all knew which way the sea was, even in the bucket. When we turned the bucket round to face the other way, the baby turtles turned too. The urge to help them along their journey is so very, very strong.

These days the advice is to let them do that crawl themselves rather than get involved, because the crawl seems to wake something up in them, maybe even help them learn the beach as home.

Back when I was young and had long hair.

Back on the beach, a lucky hatchling will reach the wet sand, then tumble into the first wave, and start swimming. It hardly stops for the first 24 hours, paddling hard to get clear of the shallows, where more predators wait.

And then it disappears.

When Archie Carr began studying turtles in the 1950s, he found they swam way out from the beach and turned up again years later, half-grown, feeding near the coast. It took until recent times with modern technology, to add tiny tracking tags, showing exactly where they go: far offshore, drifting among floating rafts of seaweed, eating, hiding and slowly growing.

Growing up takes a green turtle 20 to 50 years. Half a lifetime at sea, nearly all of it trying to stay out of sight.

And then, if she's one of the very few, a female turns for home. She comes back to the beach where she hatched. Scientists have a theory that she may remember the magnetic signature of that beach, carried in her body after all those years. But that is still a theory, the truth is, we don't really know. It is one of Earth's beautiful mysteries.