Environment

Coexisting with Nature: Odisha’s Inspiring Story of Turtle Conservation

By Aditya Anurag Nanda

Posted on March 13, 2025

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Stories are powerful, but are they potent enough to motivate an entire community to work in unison?

This self-intriguing question emerged the other day as I visited a coastal village in Odisha.

Untimely casualty reporting creates discomfort, but the visuals of the scattered dead bodies generate tribulation, especially when the living entities are vulnerable to losing their lives if they intend to engage in the act of procreation, a natural phenomenon of each species to continue their order in this world!

Recent social media recounting shows the carcasses of Olive Ridley Sea Turtle lying hither and thither on the east coast of India, generating a mournfulness and melancholy with the wild life enthusiasts.

These olive-green color, heart-shaped shell bearers, the second smallest in the sea turtle family are generally found in the open sea belonging to the Atlantic Ocean, the Pacific Ocean, and the Indian Ocean, around two thousand miles away from the coastline.

Even though these marine animals spend most of their time in the high seas of the tropical and subtropical regions, they nest only on a few selected tropical coasts with specific beach criteria for multiple reasons.

The chosen nesting site by the oviparous mother turtle depends on varieties of criteria, like seawater temperature, beach slope, sand grain size, beach pattern, etc. to ensure the safe hatching of their offspring.

Site identification is not the only point for the mother turtle to lay their eggs, their unique and uncommon process of procreation, forces them to search for something else in the chosen site, i.e. the availability of abundant food.

It is a known fact that the oviparous Olive Ridley Sea turtles spawn eggs, and simultaneously they follow natural open-hatching, a unique and uncommon in the animal world.

The egg-laden mother turtle holding a stomach full of eggs that may vary between 90 to 150 in numbers, comes ashore in the selected sites in the tropical regions near river mouths or estuaries, for laying eggs.

The heavy mother with arduous effort prepares a burrow on the beach, far away from the tide line for the incubation of the eggs.

The preferred nesting site is low in saline content but high in humidity while maintaining sufficient space in the burrow for aeration and ventilation for the eggs to grow properly.

The nest, varying between one foot to two feet deep, is prepared diligently by the mother using her hind flappers as a scoop, followed by the slow discharge of all the eggs one by one in the hole.

After releasing all the eggs in the burrow, she carefully covers the place with the sand. To secure the loose sand, she did not forget to thump the place with her heavy body, a gesture of showing love and care for her babies! Probably the time to say goodbye to the hatching and slide to the seawater!

Within a period of forty to fifty days, the baby hatchlings come out of the burrow. As they emerge from beneath the ground, they move directly toward the direction of the sea on their own.

They take the first food of their life in the sea. Here comes the role of the mothers, who have previously inspected, before the beginning of the process of hatching, the availability of abundant aquatic invertebrates and jellyfish, the delicacy for the baby turtles.

The mother turtle selects the big grain sandy beach in tropical areas to ensure the security of the hatchlings while emerging from beneath the burrow, and the beach is preferably located near the river mouth with the assurance of sufficient food for their babies, a potentially conflicting site with human greed!

These areas are fertile in terms of the aquatic world and humans with big investments created the trollers, the zero fishing nets, etc., and installed the equipment in these marine ecologies, proving to be fatal for the turtle communities.

The bruised, wounded adult turtles by the advanced technologies of the humans, succumb to the injuries, drifted by the forces of the waves found scattered in the coastlines, a heart-wrenching sight to see.

However, contrary to these agonizing and distressing visuals in social media, one community-led Olive Ridley Turtle Protection initiative on the coastline of Odisha generated amazement and admiration.

Engulfed by curiosity to know more about the community’s effort to protect turtles we visited the particular coastal village of Odisha.

It was a delightful experience to see the village youth’s commitment to saving turtles by adopting the native modality and eco-friendly approach. The discussions with the community members were very touching and moving.

They shared their stories of volunteering, night patrolling, and rescuing vulnerable turtles and their eggs, with much excitement. They also shared that at the household level women folk of the family encourage them to work for these humble and modest marine creatures.

It aroused a sense of query; how can a whole community be so sensitive to take care of these speechless marine animals?

In response to our exploration temperament, an energetic young person enumerated the role of these unpretentious aquatic animals in the marine ecosystem, directly impacting the welfare of human society.

However, the answer couldn’t quench the thirst for knowing the motivating factor for the entire village community working in unison for turtle protection!

A senior volunteer could read our mind and shared with a hint of a smile, “Even though we don’t believe in this fact, popular folklore prevailing in this part of the land is that these turtles help in dissipating the cyclones in the earlier phase of rapidly rotating air flow and render the storm becoming enormous to cause havoc.”

It aroused inquisitiveness, reflected in our facial and body language, and motivated the speaker to elaborate on the story.

He said, “Our forefathers say in the earlier phase of the cyclone when the wind starts rotating, so does the seawater in the open sea. These hard-shell creatures million in numbers, move in the direction of the turning around of the seawater and obstruct the smooth flow of water along with the wind. This creates a major hurdle in the formation of the cyclones. So, we should protect these marine animals, fighting the war with the cyclones in the up-sea front and protecting our lives.”

The end of the story brought a smile amongst the community members as if embracing the funniness in the innocence of the fable.

But it erupted a spark within us that how smoothly and swiftly our previous generations have integrated various animals, birds, and reptiles into folklore, tales, and mythological parables just to make us realize that humans alone cannot survive in this world. We need to understand, that this world equally belongs to other animals and we need to coexist with them by caring, nurturing, and protecting them.

Probably, the time has come that we need to create another genre of stories to help us learn to coexist and rebuild the ecosystem for the welfare of our future generation.