Today is World Oceans Day, and I figure it would be a suitable time to pen down my experiences with one of its oldest and most mysterious inhabitants, the sea turtles.
Being a participant stuck the endless corporate rat race, I was sold by the idea of being marooned for eight days, on a small quaint private beach named Chagar Hutang, Redang Island, sequestered from the outside world, with no cellular phone reception, no daily newspapers, and no contact with anyone else other than my fellow volunteers, the research assistants, the two caretakers and our nightly guests who crawls up the sandy beaches to nest.
Our days were filled with performing chores around the research center, such as recording the position of the new nests in relation to the grids on the beach, patrolling for egg predators like ghost crabs or monitor lizard, and cleaning the beach. In between all this, we were able to lounge around the hammocks, and catching up on books that we meant to read but never had the time to (for the record, I devoured within a week, Freakanomics by by Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner, Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell, and Animal Farm by George Orwell).
Things got interesting at night though, when the nesting hours begin.
We start recording data once the turtles land on the beach. We recorded the time that lapsed between her landing and the commencement of the body-pitting process, the depth of the nest once she starts laying her eggs, the length and width of its carapace (that's the top part of her shell, for the uninitiated) and mark the nest for further work the next morning.
If the nesting turtle has been previously tagged on its front fins, the tag numbers are also jotted down. If not, well, volunteers are also trained to perform tagging in the absence of the research assistants or the caretakers (A tip for future taggers, do not flinch just because the fins move, and neither should you blame those who were holding up the torch lights for you).
I remember the first night we spent on the beach. A comforting silence was shared among us while we laid on the mats placed upon the uneven sand, gazing at the billions of stars lighting up the clear heaven skies. It was truly a humbling experience. The cloudless skies even gave me a glimpse of a streaking shooting star, a sight rarely seen in the smog filled and light polluted city skies.
How many of us can truly say that we have fallen asleep beneath the twinkling stars, only to be softly woken up by falling raindrops or the sounds of sand gently displaced by the strong fins of a sea turtle crawling up the beach?
The sea turtles were another sight to behold. Large and weighing over 100 kilograms each, these ancient gentle giants returns every nesting season to the same beach on which they were hatched many years ago. I've had the priviledge of observing turtles both on land and in the sea. Early in 2011, I swam with a couple of sea turtles in Pulau Perhentian, trying to keep up while the turtles swam effortlessly right underneath me. While they may seem clumsy and slow on land, in the water, they glide gracefully from feeding at the bottom of the sea bed to the surface of the sea for air.
There were other experiences to be had at Chagar Hutang other than the turtles. We were given a guided hike up a hill for an aerial view of Turtle Rock, and on days when our feet yearns for a little pampering, we headed to the natural prawn spa, where baby prawns at a stream nibbles away at the dead skins around any part of your body that you dare dip in. Beware, it is intensely ticklish!
On our final day, we were extremely lucky that one of the turtles decided to hang around till the morning sun dawned on us. This gave us the opportunity to quickly snap a photo of us with the turtle, without the burst of camera flashes which could potentially scare the little critter, especially in the dark covers of the night.
The good people of SEATRU ("Sea Turtles Research Unit") and UMT ("University Malaysia Terengganu") have been tireless in promoting the awareness of sea turtle conservation. They are one of the eco-warriors that we must recognise and applaud, more so on World Oceans Day.
So for what it is worth, go find out more about the various programs that SEATRU have for different folks from different age groups, and if you are willing to, sign up for the volunteer program and I can assure you that it will be an experience that you will treasure (and maybe even blog about...) for the rest of your life.
Please visit the following sites:
- SEATRU's official website: http://seatru.wordpress.com/
- My take on ocean conservation, sharks and their greatest enemy: http://wheretimeisnot.blogspot.com/2011/05/blue-is-new-green.html
No comments:
Post a Comment