Turtle Farm!

Our visit to the turtle farm on Isla Mujeres was definitely a highlight of our trip to Cancun. No, there weren’t turtles roaming over the open plains. Carefully labeled nests of incubating eggs were protected behind tall fences. Masses of tiny turtles, no bigger than your palm, endlessly swarmed around circular tanks. Growing turtles glided past each other in large, ocean holding pens. It’s a place like no other, where a kid can be a kid. Turtle kids, that is.

Every year under the cover of night, sea turtles crawl up onto the beaches of Isla Mujeres and Cancun to lay their eggs. The female turtles return to the same beach where, as hatchlings, they dug their way out of the sand and first journeyed to the ocean. No one is completely sure how they find the exact same spot after so many years ago, but the earth’s magnetic fields probably have something to do with it.

But a turtle’s chances aren’t very good. Even if the mother braves the tourists, disorienting lights, and lawn chairs littering the sand, their babies still have to be incredibly lucky. Animals or poachers can steal the eggs. The buried eggs can be squished as machines move across the beaches, smoothing the sand. Newly hatched baby turtles can get turned around and head towards the bright lights of the hotels, instead of the ocean.

This is where places like the Turtle Farm come in. Volunteers patrol the beaches from May to September, looking for nesting turtles. The eggs are collected and taken to Tortugranja where they’re incubated in the sand. Once they’re hatched, the turtles are moved to tanks, then holding pens, and finally, when they’re big enough to have a fighting chance, they’re released into the ocean.

I felt giddy being so close to these graceful giants. Green Turtles flew through the water, propelling themselves with long flippers, expelling a blast of air as they rose to the surface. I wanted to touch their marbled shells. To swim with them as they glided through the water. I longed to be a part of their elusive underwater world.

But I couldn’t. Despite my turtley dreams, they are wild animals. They belong out in the ocean and seperate from my person-centered world. But I feel lucky to have visited such a place. And though I hope my close presence didn’t affect the turtles very much, they definitely affected me.

Posted in Nifty happenings

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Trackback from your own site.