On a warm and dark night, a female turtle moves slowly over the sand of the very same beach that saw her birth just a few years ago.
The beach is at La Escobilla, just down the highway from Puerto Escondido, and we are here to witness the arrival of golfina turtles that have come to spawn. We are accompanied by engineer Manuel Rodríguez Gómez, who is the director of the Mexican Center for the Turtle in Mazunte, and the director of the Turtle Sanctuary at La Escobilla; together with biologist Martha Harfush, who is in charge of the sanctuary and has dedicated 17 years to take care of turtles in this place.
On this night the sight is beyond explanation. You are kept silently surprised by the huge number of turtles. Some are in the midst of spawning and others are already heading back to the sea.
A turtle spends around two hours in the spawning process from the moment she arrives on the beach: finding a place to spawn her eggs, carving a hole that is 30 to 40 cm deep, and performing the spawning process, which takes from 30 to 40 minutes. Then she spends some 15 to 20 minutes covering the nest with sand and flattening it before returning to the sea.
The turtle performs this marvelous process in a very slow fashion, while challenged by serious difficulty in getting around. Because of the great effort required a lot of groaning acompanies the process. It’s worth mentioning that once the turtle starts spawning, the process won’t stop for any reason. Even if the turtle is picked up and moved, according to biologists, she keeps expelling eggs.
Martha Harfush said that mating takes an average of 30 days, during which the male is mounted over the female turtle. When it’s over the male appears dead. That shouldn’t be a surprise: 30 days is a long time!
The Mexican Center for the Turtle estimates that over one million turtles of the golfina species arrive annually at La Escobilla.
This starts in the months of July and August and ends between December and January.
Hatching time of the eggs is 40 to 45 days. Once they are born, the turtles that survive need between eight to ten years to be able to mate.
Every turtle spawns an average of 100 eggs, of which, according to the biologists, only a fraction survives. This is because the eggs are exposed to different dangers: ants, flies, beetles, dogs, birds, and humans.
An interesting fact: when the beach is filled with nests and a turtle comes and selects a space as her own, she will use it even if it is occupied, destroying the eggs already there and creating space to deposit her own. That night I visited La Escobilla I saw one of them do just that; the little eggs came flying out like golf balls.
In the area where we were watching, which was about 40 meters in diameter, there were over 70 turtles spawning.
Prime time for the arrival of turtles is between 11 pm and 4 am.
Turtle facts:
Size: 80 cm long, 60 kg in weight
Diet: Prawns and jellyfish
The spawning area is from Baja California Sur to Central America.
Adult golfina turtles are considered one of the most numerous species, but threatened nonetheless. These turtles migrate from their feeding to their breeding zone, and only grown females return to the beach to spawn. A nest can have between 60 and 170 eggs, which must be incubated between six and 13 weeks.
Baby turtles coming out of the nest head immediately towards the brightest light, typically the moon.
Mature females return to the beaches where they were born to breed and lay their eggs. They make between two and three nests per season, even though they generally lay eggs every two years. Their life expectancy is 50 years.
In the small town of La Escobilla, there is a cooperative called Turtle Sanctuary of la Escobilla, organized in such a way that they serve as tourist guides for scheduled visits. There is a small restaurant along with cabins with prices ranging from $400 to $450 per night.
La Escobilla is a turtle sanctuary because of the huge number of turtles that arrive year-round, and is the most important marine turtle nesting center in Mexico from a numerical standpoint, and one of the most important worldwide.
This beach is around 25 km long and is located in the municipality of Santa María Tonameca. The nesting zone is around seven or eight kilometres long and is located at the eastern side of the beach.
Reprinted from the archives of El Sol de la Costa.
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