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The Endangered Leatherback Turtle

By Dea Adria Mallin

After delivering a lecture on the solar system, philosopher and psychologist William James was approached by an elderly lady who claimed she had a theory superior to the one described by him. “We don’t live on a ball rotating around the sun,” she said. “We live on a crust of earth on the back of a giant turtle.” Not wishing to demolish this absurd argument with the massive scientific evidence at his command, James decided to dissuade his opponent gently. “If your theory is correct, madam, what does the turtle stand on?” “You’re a clever man, Mr. James, and it’s a good question, but I can answer that. The first turtle stands on the back of a second, far larger turtle.” “But what, my dear lady, does the second turtle stand on?” James asked patiently. The old lady crowed triumphantly, “It’s no use, Mr. James. It’s TURTLES ALL THE WAY DOWN!”

It is 4 a.m. on a tranquil Caribbean beach, and the Southern Cross stretches low on the horizon. Most people are asleep in their beds, tucked in neatly while the air conditioner hums through the night. Not me. I am keeping my vigil. As a member of Team VI on a scientific expedition, I have been  on patrol since dusk in St. Croix, looking for 1,600 lb. marine turtles. I will patrol until dawn  because these are the hours when leatherbacks climb ashore to nest.

The liability release I signed before I left home warned me that these volunteer expeditions “are not designed for tourists,” and I have agreed to put up with “unconventional modes of transportation, odd hours, delays, frustrations, and unpredictable surprises” that are part of such adventures. I have even paid tax-deductible dollars for the privilege of this vigil.

What exactly am I doing on a gorgeous island in the Caribbean Sea, working through the night for two weeks? I am here as part of Earthwatch Institute, an international non-profit organization near Boston which brings volunteers -- willing to travel at their own expense and eager to make a difference – together in the field with research scientists from universities, laboratories, and museums.

Though Earthwatch began in 1974 with a mere 39 people on four teams, today adventurers from 16 to over 80, and from the United States and abroad, clamor to volunteer for the field research. Says founding member and former president Brian Rosborough, “Earthwatch is a little bit like Tom Sawyer; we’re getting a thousand people a year to whitewash the fence!”

My fellow “whitewashers” on the leatherback turtle project include a naturalist; a pharmacist and his medical technologist wife; a pilot and her husband, a businessman who reads The Dialogues of Plato in his beach chair; and a structural engineer and his wife. And then there is the quirky law enforcement officer who keeps his own apartment like a desert environment and has come to the project directly from his pet tarantula, snapping turtle, and tiger salamander.

The 80-page briefing had described our task in thoroughly endearing terms: “Earthwatch team members will help the newborns reach the water safely.” These “newborns,” or hatchlings, would be the next generation of a species that had co-existed with the dinosaurs and now faced biological extinction. threatened around the world by beachfront development of their nesting grounds, egg-eating predators, rain-immersion of nesting soil, tidewash, shrimp trawlers, plastic garbage bags that resemble the jellyfish, their only food, and human poachers. Turtle eggs raided from a nest bring quick money in many countries from impotent men and also from pregnant women hoping that eating turtle eggs will safeguard a pregnancy. Sometimes the nests are raided, and sometimes the turtle is turned upside down and slit open for her egg sac. Even when the turtle eggs do survive to bring forth hatchlings, only 1 in 10,000 is estimated to make it through the first year.

My team will see to it that as many hatchlings as possible get that chance. We will tag, time, and measure, adding to the scant body of knowledge of Dermochelys coriacea. We will count her viable and non-viable eggs, move her endangered nests, and keep poachers away. And if we are lucky, we will see the last of the laying turtles and the first of the hatchlings. After a 60-75-day  incubation period, a clutch of leatherback hatchlings will bubble up from the nest, as many as one hundred in five minutes, scramble over each other, and race towards a moonlit sea.

The first night out comes so swiftly that no one has a chance to think. Heeding briefing instructions, we grab insect repellent, canteens, and flashlights, tie raincoats around our waists for sudden tropical downpours, and squeeze onto the back of the Fish and Wildlife pickup truck, ready for adventure. But what a pickup looks like quickly gives way to what it feels like after five miles of unpaved roads with overhanging branches. 

Once on the isolated beach of Sandy Point, our vision of trekking barefoot across pristine moonlit sands is another illusion to give way – this time to tangles of sea grape, spiky coral branches, erosion bluffs, and a waning moon that keeps getting lost behind clouds.

We walk and sweat and sweat and walk. Everything that will later become second nature is torture that first night, as our feet stumble and get scraped, and we huff and strain to see, and the stillness on the west side of Sandy Point bothers us as much as the roaring winds on its south side. When the rains come, they come suddenly and fiercely.

As I stand sopping with the others through the third downpour of the night, I decide to head for the shrubs and trees rather than remain in the path of the lighting bouncing down the beach. One of the principal investigators spots me and follows, calling out between the thunderbolts, “Get out from under that tree!” I move to the urgency in her voice, leaving the slight shelter of the trees. I am cold from the rain, hot from the all-night patrol, exhausted from having been up for 26 hours, and disappointed because there are no turtles.  I remember the liability release I’d signed and the personality profile I’d filled in; what were those jaunty phrases about my flexibility and my sense of humor? Either would have come in handy for the next pronouncement. “I think,” came the voice of academe, “that you are standing under the poison manchineel tree.”

Poison manchineel, I discover in the next frozen moments, is common on the island and quite harmless – unless it rains. Then, it drips a substance which acts like battery acid, etching itself into any skin it might touch. So. This is what they meant in the liability release when I agreed to hold everyone “harmless against the loss of health” unless an act of theirs was “wanton or reckless.” But hadn’t I, of my own “wanton and reckless” volition, sought shelter under the trees? I could have stayed with the others on the beach, prepared with advance knowledge of how to dig myself rapidly into the sand should lightning bounce my way. And hadn’t I always known not to stand under a tree in a lightning storm? I shudder heavily, shudder again lightly, and then surrender to darkness, storm, heat, lightning, sand, and poison manchineel.

As the sky lightens, our team soggily returns to the pickup that had deposited us ten hours earlier. We ride back clutching the sides of the pickup, our thirst for adventure nearly slaked, while our principal investigators blithely sing the praises of birding in the salt pond nearby.

The second night out gives us the real impetus to keep going. Around midnight, we come across tracks that are neither human nor ghost crab. They are hatchling tracks. Bunches of tiny scratchmarks leading to the sea. And there, in the sand, we find one small straggler, unlucky enough to have been suffocated by the sand or by the mad tramplings of siblings. It is so beautiful as to cause a hush, such a minuscule grey-black version of its kind, flippers and white markings all in place. Our first leatherback, three inches long.

Later that evening, we get to make the comparison between this first tiny find and the six-foot adult. She arrives unseen and silent. Adapted to sea life, she moves laboriously on land on her elbows. She drags the weight of her body to get above the high water line, and every few minutes, she stops to heave a ragged sigh. Nearsighted on land, she searches out her nesting place. When she is satisfied, she begins to body pit, her front and back flippers thrusting with mammoth strength to make a comfortable  nesting area for herself. But she is too close to the water line, and the pit she creates is destroyed by an aggressive wash of sea, like my sand castles on the beaches of long ago summers. Unaware of the creeping tide, I would build my castle ever higher, ever more intricate, ever more beautiful, only to have it leveled by the lashing of one cruel wave. Surely, this sea turtle will soon reach her level of frustration.

She turns her body several times, seeking out the safe spot. Each time, she begins her furious instinctive motions, and each time is thwarted by a single wave. We watch her in the moonlight, as she finally gives up, stopping only to be tagged and measured by our principal investigator. Finally, she reenters the water, a dark hulk, resurfacing just once for air, then disappearing into her element. It is 1:30 a.m. and if anyone is out of their element, it’s us. Nothing more occurs during our patrols that night.

Perhaps too little turtle at night focuses attention on what we can do with our days. We hardly manage to sleep past noon, and while we are awake, we think a lot about eating and drinking, since breakfast, lunch, and dinner all have to be squeezed in between noon and 7 p.m. On our list of things to bring on the expedition was a favorite recipe. I have brought a recipe for Elephant Stew. It calls for one medium-sized elephant, brown gravy to cover, and salt and pepper. The instructions say to cut the elephant into bite-sized pieces, add gravy, and cook about four weeks at 465˚.  Amusing, until I discover that turtle-meat stew and turtle-skin pocketbooks are among the reasons the leatherback is an endangered species.

I put away my funny recipe and settle into feasting on sweet potato pie plumped with local mango and papaya, fried conch made from the meat of a regulation-sized conch we’d tracked while snorkeling, and dolphin. Our dolphin order at the fish pier nearly makes me bring out my funny recipe for elephant stew, but then I remember that dolphin, fish is not dolphin, mammal.

Included in our food budget is a dinner on the town at a gracious old plantation, the oldest greathouse in the Virgin Islands and the only French plantation still intact. We climb a gentle slope lush with frangipani, banyan trees, and plumeria, and horses grazing by the white fences of the riding stables. In a room with settees and antiques, we take our rum punch from a mahogany bar. Windows open out on verandas, and banana bunches hang from ceiling pulleys. Dinner is elegant, made and served by a family that has owned the greathouse for generations. Then, on mental alert, Team VI rises, flees the plantation, doffs party duds and dons mosquito jackets and backpacks, and within thirty minutes of having dined on homemade melon ice cream and apricot pie, is jouncing around the back of the pickup again for the dusk-to-dawn patrol.

Our third night out brings paydirt. We are now able to keep up the rapid pace our principal investigators have set for the nights, and we are no longer overwhelmed by their stop-dead scientific terms or the weighty facts in their repertoire. We are starting to ask the right questions, know the terrain well enough to be divided into small patrol groups, and have even begun to acquire anecdotal material for our return to civilization.

This kind of confidence comes, to be sure, from not yet having to “work a turtle.” I have begun to think of the expedition as a 10-hour exercise class in which I will never be required to do tummy crunches, but merely 15 or 16 miles of fast walking in the dark. This is probably what I was thinking about when my patrol of three fell over a turtle.

Suddenly, the 8-foot calipers on my shoulder seems too heavy; I will actually have to stretch across the carapace with it to measure notch-to-tip. So I quickly trade it for the more familiar writer’s tools and become keeper of the data sheets. When you’ve never touched a giant leatherback, even though you’ve heard she won’t snap or bite like her endangered cousins, all you can remember is that if you stuffed your arm down her unusually constructed throat, you’d stand as much chance of getting it back whole as you would your tires from one of those “Treadles Damage Tires” parking lots.

Holding my arm close to my body, then, I begin to fill in the data sheets. Our turtle has already body-pitted and is rhythmically digging her nest. With her sensitive hind flippers, and not a glance backwards, she forms a clean nest, and then, with eyes tearing and moans and sighs all too human, she deposits 142 shiny, white eggs into her nest. Still using her flippers, she flings sand madly in great arcs to cover her nest, tamps down the sand, disguises her site, and proudly returns to the sea -- a great lady, a great lay.   

If I think I’ve covered the territory by drawing flawless diagrams on the data sheets and using words like “sixikanti” to describe the number of ridges on the carapace, or by distinguishing viable from non-viable eggs, I have yet to learn humility. A turtle that had plagued us one night by her all-crawl, no-lay antics finally decides to drop her eggs but does it perversely just inches below the high-water mark, and more perversely, just minutes before dawn. This means that we will have to stay on the beach well into morning to catch her eggs as she lays them, then move them to safer ground by simulating her nest well above the high-water mark.

We are perpetually exhausted by now, and I surmise that a good place for this extended obstetrical rendezvous is lying down, so I volunteer to catch the eggs as the turtle lays them, before they fall into her two-and-a-half-foot-deep nest. Lying down in the sand is easy. Lying down in wet sand with sand fleas is stupid. But lying down in wet sand with sand fleas under 1,600 pounds of turtle is madness. Contorted partially beneath the turtle to catch her eggs, I know that if I disturb her nest with its perfect narrow neck and bulbous base, she will stop laying. And if she moves, I will be pinned underneath. I am caught between self-preservation and the preservation of an endangered species; if I am any kind of witness to evolution, then the turtle should outlast man.

Every four or five seconds, another mucous-covered ball drops into my hand, a glare of white from a flashlight making it glisten as I hand it up into the darkness. 107 eggs later, I realize that I have to get out from under before her mighty flipper tosses me out. She has one brief moment, a bridge in her musical score, before she begins to cover the nest, and I do not want to be covered, but I am stiff. I feel that panic I’d felt under the poison manchineel but no psychic concession to inevitability as I maneuver to safety.

Eventually, neophyte turtles blur in our minds with tagged turtles, nests on the southeast point blur with nests on the west side, and the phrase “moonlit beach” will never again bring to mind romance. Unless my wooing of a leatherback up a four foot embankment counts.

The flat beach on the south side of the island had lost nearly 200 feet of sand between April, when the turtles begin to lay, and June, when they are finishing their maternity season, and much of the area has been cut by waves into four- and five-foot erosion bluffs. A turtle is lucky if she comes up on a gentle slope. Now a tagged turtle that has tried to come ashore several times during the night emerges for her fifth and last attempt to put her eggs into a nest, only she emerges at a high bluff. She makes several attempts to get up, and nearly perpendicular, simply stops. Like the others who have come to this wall before her, she will give up and drop her eggs in the sea.

Remembering my own long labor and giving birth in the hospital hallway, I am moved to help her, though my teammates think it futile and stand well back. I approach slowly, and lie flat on the upper level of sand, my face within inches of hers. A leatherback inspires neither cuddling nor petting, but her eyes spill great salty tears (actually, to rid themselves of sand and excess salt), and each time she sighs, I feel intense kinship and soon lose all consciousness of time and space.

I promise her a birthing place and talk quietly to her as I slowly shift and angle the heavy, wet sand. I encourage, I cajole. I nod. I praise. And soon I am telling her all my stories and the stories of the planet whose underbelly she knows so well, she who waited 35 years and more to lay eggs, she who swam 3,000 miles from Nova Scotia to fulfill her destiny as species mother on this beach, on this night.

She stays, immobile for what my teammates, standing 40 yards back, will later tell me amounted to two hours. When I have finally cleared enough sand, I gently pat the earth and tell her, perhaps because I have spent enough time on Pueblo Indian reservations with the two-leggeds, the four-leggeds, and the wingeds to put aside my principal investigators’ identification of leatherbacks as purely instinctual creatures, that we are ready. I tell her that I will lift my arm and place it on the sand, and if she understands my motion, she should lift her flipper and place it near my hand, and mirabile dictu, she does it! Waiting patiently for me to clear and pat, she follows and follows again, and who can tell the dancer from the dance.

On our last night, someone from another patrol spots a flurry of scratch marks made by the last of a clutch of hatchlings off to Nova Scotia. The team follows the marks and manages to catch one of the newborns, and they race it down the beach for our inspection and adoration, then return it to the original nesting site should it need to imprint its full seaward trek. Those 65 days between the time a round wet egg the size of a tennis ball drops into the nest and this night when it brings forth a live miracle seem like a long journey indeed. But it is only the beginning. If this hatchling survives, it can live for perhaps 125 years. What an ironic counterpoint to the message we have been receiving at 28-second intervals from the shrill blips of the nuclear submarine in the Frederiksted harbor.   

Holding piña coladas and shading our eyes from the strong Caribbean sun on the day of departure, I ask one of the repeat Earthwatchers, who had lured her husband along on this expedition, if she would do it again. In her offhand style, she says, “Sure! But I wouldn’t do this one.” “Why not? I query, certain to hear about the eroded beach, the buggy, sweaty, soggy, sleepless nights. “Why not? Because I’ve already done it! I’ll come back and learn something else next year.” And so will I.

In retrospect, it was a bit of a physical ordeal. For the same money, I could have spent a week at a luxury spa where I would have been pampered into tranquility and rubbed with scented oils. Instead, I rubbed my own tired feet. But I did it on a beautiful island, and in an atmosphere of teamwork and camaraderie fostered by two incredible principal investigators. And as the primal moments mounted, so did our sense of harmony and balance and delight, and for some, a sense of larger purpose and meaning.

On a morning last week, my mind’s eye grazed the remembered carapace of the leatherback, with her barnacles and ectoparasites and occasional marks left during mating. As I recalled her emergence, her nesting, and that timeless return to the sea, I realized how much I want this ancient, gentle creature to survive. Surely the lady in the William James anecdote was wrong about her turtle theory in the scientific sense. But in a Faulknerian sense, she was right. It is “turtles all the way down.” In a world of uncertainty and confused morality, where destruction threatens, the creative force of an ancient species lumbering up on a sandy beach in the dark to put her mark on the future makes all the spas in the world mere decoration.

Happy to report that…

The Earthwatch Institute leatherback turtle project on St. Croix in the Virgin Islands, at what is now the Sandy Point National Wildlife Refuge, is one of the longest running sea turtle research and conservation projects of its kind in the world. Here, after two decades, nesting leatherbacks, the world’s largest reptiles, are beginning to make a recovery, with numbers recently doubling those of two decades ago, though the rest of the global population is in freefall. Scott and Karen Eckert, the principal investigators then in their late twenties, are today among the world’s  leading herpetologists. Today, field research involves the use of ultrasound, microwave ID tags, and satellite tracking which has followed leatherbacks over 16,000 kilometers a year – or the distance from New York to Athens and back.