Five of us headed north from camp on West Bay, Little Andaman. The full moon shone brightly on the beach, and we didn’t need torches to light our way. No ships twinkled on the horizon, nor was there any evidence of humanity. We crossed old turtle tracks eroded by the wind.
Since 2010, a consortium of research organisations led by Kartik Shanker and Naveen Namboothri, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, had tagged seven leatherbacks on this beach. We were looking to wire up the eighth turtle with a transmitter.
If we came upon one, there would be no time to lose. While the turtle laid 80 to 100 eggs, the researchers would drill a hole through the central bony ridge on her back and tie a satellite transmitter with plastic-coated wire. Tough luck if she finished laying her eggs before the researchers were done. There was no way to restrain a behemoth weighing up to 900 kg.
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As exciting as the opportunity was, my back was killing me, and I couldn’t walk any farther. I considered crashing out on the sand right there, but there were saltwater crocodiles about.
I hobbled back to camp and curled up in my sleeping bag, breathing the strong-smelling vapours of muscle relaxant.
Waves crashed ashore in a loud boom, numerous crabs scratched around the tent, and in the forest, a Verreaux’s gecko barked rhythmically.
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I lay awake thinking of the record-setting globetrotters. Leatherbacks were the largest turtles in the world; they dove down to 1,200 mt, more than any other reptile; they migrated the farthest, from the tropics to subarctic waters; and they ate a monotonous diet of jellyfish.
Instead of a hard, smooth shell, hard rubber-like thick skin stretched over seven ridges, running lengthwise down their backs.
One turtle tagged on West Bay reached Timor, 7,312 km away, in 179 days. Another leatherback swam south of Maldives, hung around Diego Garcia for a few days before heading for Seychelles, a distance of 6,998 km, in 183 days. Two others passed Cocos (Keeling) Islands. Final destinations of these turtles remain unknown as the radio devices malfunctioned.
A leatherback tagged in Papua New Guinea by another group of researchers crossed the Pacific and reached northern U.S. A couple of months later, she popped down to Hawaii, for a sojourn in tropical waters for the next five months.
When Kartik had briefed us on the project’s results, I asked, “What does this scattering across the oceans mean?”
He answered, “Sea turtle hatchlings spend most of their time circling oceans on large gyres and currents. At some point in their development, they find good feeding grounds, and when they become adults, return to their natal shores to nest. They probably then return to those same feeding grounds because they don’t know any others.”
I woke up when the team returned at 2.30 a.m. I knew from just seeing their tired but happy faces they had tagged a turtle. They narrated how it happened. They had sat down to rest awhile. When it was time to continue walking, Meera, Kartik’s partner, stood up and stretched, wistfully saying, “Wouldn’t it be nice if a turtle came up and nested right here?”
There in the surf, at that very moment, she saw a leatherback waiting for the coast to clear. They kept a low profile until the turtle heaved herself on to the shore and began digging a nest hole. If only I had been able to walk an hour longer, I might have seen the turtle too.
For the next two nights, I walked a stretch of the seven-km beach with others, but no turtle came ashore.
Six months later, the eighth turtle was off the coast of Dampier peninsula, north-western Australia.
One of these winters, with the same certainty as leatherbacks navigate across the oceans, I’m taking my now-healed back to that little speck of an arrowhead-shaped island in the Andaman Sea.