On Thursday, August 15, it will be independence day for three Olive Ridley turtles that were rescued from ‘ghost’ fishing nets by fishermen and a local marine research group here at Kovalam last week.
All three will be released into the sea in the afternoon, as they have sufficiently recovered from injuries.
“A vet with the Animal Husbandry Department has examined them. They can be released now,” said M.K. Anil, scientist-in-charge of the Vizhinjam unit of the Central Marine Fisheries Research Institute (CMFRI), which had ‘adopted’ the turtles after their rescue on August 8.
The Olive Ridleys (Lepidochelys olivacea), tangled up in a discarded fishing net, had been sighted some 150 m out at sea in Kovalam around 6.30 a.m. on August 8. Fishermen and volunteers of Friends of Marine Life (FML) had managed to drag the net up to the beach one hour later. Finding that the turtles were still alive, but exhausted and injured by their ordeal, they had alerted the Forest Department.
Forest officials transferred the turtles to the CMFRI unit for treatment and aftercare.
Away from shore
On Thursday, the turtles will be taken out in a boat and released two nautical miles away from the shore, FML convener Robert Panipilla said. “That is because the near-shore reefs in Kovalam are ridden with ‘ghost nets’ — fishing nets that are abandoned or lost in the sea. We do not want them to get ensnared accidentally again,” he said.
In fact, the Olive Ridley episode clearly illustrates the threat posed by these nets to marine life forms, Mr. Panipilla said. The UN Ocean Conference held in 2017 also had drawn attention to the problem of such nets. A large pile of fishing nets was among the tonnes of garbage that washed up in Kovalam in June.
