Sea Turtles

At first it was hard for me to get us to being here in Granada. I must admit that it was a big adjustment to what I was use to in the United States. I was even more afraid when my teacher told us that we were going to go camping. Not because I haven’t been camping before but because I had never been camping in a different country. I think I was mostly afraid of the spiders because believe me no matter what anybody says to me there out there waiting to bite.

When we got on the bus we were told that it was only going to be two hours. That turned out to be a little more like four but I must say that it was all worth it. I had done a little reading about what we were going to be doing and seeing on our trip but nothing could have actually prepared me for what I experienced.

I read about the Sea Turtles in Nicaragua and I thought to myself who cares there turtles. It’s not that interesting. I was even thinking about going to sleep early because I was not interested in seeing them at all. I thank God that I didn’t. The reading talked about the beach that we went to called La Flor located in Rivas and how they were trying to help save the sea turtles. On this every page it went on to explain how sometimes thousands of turtles would come all at once. This would be called arribadas.

Most of this seemed to me as boring, until I met with Marlin, the director of the refugee. He was explaining to me how he had a serious problem with his beach because he was getting proximally 186,000 turtles a year laying their eggs but only 315,000 babies were being born. Now this might seem a lot to you but it’s not. In the reading Sea Turtles in Nicaragua on page 4 it states that a turtle can lay an average of 90 eggs. If we go the math about 4% of baby turtle are being born on average per year. This is not a good number.

My teacher believes that Marlin might have something wrong with his beach. His PH might be too high. He believes that there aren’t enough males waiting for females out in the ocean once they are done laying their eggs or that the females are laying eggs that are not fertilized. We don’t know exactly what they problem is. These are just hypothesis. What I do know is that La Flor needs more biologists to who are willing to come down here and help study the turtles.