Pura Vida: Hangin' Out With the Sea Turtles

Imagine a magical place where stars glow in the water and sea turtles line the shore, the moonshine glistens off their shells. It's almost midnight but your eyes have adjusted to the dark, the white sea foam dances in the tide. You run as fast as you can, free as ever, each footstep lighting a burst of luminescence in your wake. You splash kick the water, rearranging the constellations of aqua glow-bugs - they spark, sizzle and fade away into the sea.

This is Ostional, a small beach community on the pacific side of Costa Rica in Puntarenas. It is the nesting site for millions of sea turtles yearly. The turtle eggs are valuable and are extracted by the locals for sales and consumption. A large part of the economy of Ostional is based on this activity. Before you go judging this as 'tragic' as I did before actually seeing it for myself, it is important to know the whole story.

The turtles come to nest monthly in waves of mass arrivals known as 'arribadas' in Spanish. Over the course of about five days, the females will leave as many as 10 million eggs buried in the sand. Due to overcrowding, scavenging animals, fungi, fishing nets, hungry fish and other environmental conditions in and out of the water, only about 1% of all those eggs will mature into surviving baby sea turtles. On the first day of the arrival about 20,000 turtles will come ashore to lay eggs, the following day 30,000. The stretch of beach they come to is only 7 km long, the eggs laid the first two days only have a 15% chance of making it to the last day. The community members only extract eggs on the first two days, each family in the community’s association (about 200 members) is allowed just 200 eggs. In reality, the community has done more to help the turtles then harm them, as seen by the increase in population since Ostional became a community 100 years ago.