A very long time ago, the first olive ridley sea turtles began swimming in the oceans of the world. Today, they are seriously threatened, a fact that is really hard to believe because, after all, they have been on this planet more than 100,000,000 years.

To put some perspective onto this number, imagine the monstrous T Rex. It roamed the North America continent nearly seventy million years ago and, as surely as night follows day, it feasted on these sea turtles when they came ashore to nest.

Even so, these animals have flourished, despite being eaten by just about everything imaginable for tens of millions of generations. Dinosaurs, large and small, birds, mammals, and fish have eaten—and do eat their eggs, savor tasty hatchlings and, of course, their flesh.

Sea turtles even survived the greatest extinction the earth has suffered, a calamity that destroyed all of the mighty dinosaurs—and yet the turtles flourished.

Over millennia, spreading across the face of the earth, these oldest of all reptiles swam all of the tropical and temperate seas. From the Arabian Sea to the Atlantic coast of the American continents and from India to the New World on the Pacific, they flourished all around the world. Tens upon tens of millions.

In 1951, the same year that Americans began to watch “I Love Lucy,” the oceans were full of olive ridley turtles. Mexico’s Pacific coast alone had ten million olive ridley nests when the first episode of that TV show aired and every nest had about 100 eggs per clutch. That is about a billion eggs. A billion eggs laid along just one coast of Mexico in just one year. And, remember, these marine turtles were found virtually everywhere in warm or temperate waters. The numbers were limitless.

Of course, where there is a limitless resource, there is money to be had. With an unlimited number of eggs that were collected so easily and so much profit to be made, unconstrained capitalists put together massive pack trains of horses and mules and brought them to the beaches. These animals carried off hundreds of millions of eggs each nesting season, year-after-year. And, to the consternation of some, it came as a shock that within twenty years, there was but one nest in one year on a beach where there had been several hundred thousand when Desi, Lucy, Ethel, and Fred made us laugh the first time. Alas, this catastrophe was being replicated all around the world.

Meanwhile, several countries around the world, set up olive ridley fisheries. The female turtles, in particular, were easy prey because they gathered in huge numbers close to shore before coming to the ancient beaches to lay.

The result? From limitless to endangered in a few short years. One generation of men nearly accomplished what seemed impossible: nearly wiping out in the blink of an eye what had taken a hundred million generations to create.

However, as more and more countries belatedly realized the extent of depredation, some have begun taking steps to conserve and protect sea turtles. Little Costa Rica has created important reserves and worked with dedicated conservation groups and the local people of Costa Rica to rebuild stocks.

Costa Rica’s Ostional Beach on its Pacific coast is said to have the world’s largest mass nestings, called arridabas of olive ridley sea turtles. Each month, typically when the moon is in its last quarter, female turtles gather offshore for days and sometimes weeks, then suddenly come to the beach en mass. Though arribadas occur year-round, if you want to experience Costa Rica eco tourism at its finest, visit during the rainy season from October, November, and December. Sometimes, hundreds of thousands of olive ridley’s come ashore over a few days. The biggest arribada in recent years was half a million coming ashore to nest in 1995—on a beach just a few hundred yards long.

Costa Rica finally recognized that these ancient creatures are worth more than the value of their meat and eggs. But what about Mexico? Remember that pathetic single nest on the beach that had once been filled with olive ridleys? Well, the government finally decided to protect it. By 1988, it had recovered to 50,000 nests. Twelve years later there were 1,000,000 nests.

May God and mankind grant the olive ridley another 100,000,000 years.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 28th, 2009 at 7:45 am and is filed under surfing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.