The Olive Ridley (golfina in Spanish) turtle is one of the smallest sea turtles. One of the places they lay their eggs is on the beaches of the Mexican Pacific coast. They are threatened by poachers who take their eggs. They are valued for food and are considered to be an aphrodisiac by Mexicans. They are so valuable to poachers that main nesting beaches are guarded by the Mexican military carrying M-16 rifles.
At the Barra de Navidad beach, they transplant eggs laid on the public beach into a protected area and release the babies into the ocean. They do it at night so that they don't get eaten by birds right away. We heard from our neighbour at Playa Grande that they were releasing them that evening so we took a water taxi to the beach at around 7 p.m. where they had a bin of about 90 baby turtles. BL was very intrigued by the babies.
The small crowd of locals and tourists lined up on the beach and everybody covered a hand in sand and received a tiny turtle. BL loved holding it in his little hand which isn't much bigger than the baby turtle. When a small wave came by, we all put our turtles in the ocean and they just disappeared.
Here we are post release...
... making sure that they didn't just body surf back to shore on the next wave.
The crew post release:
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