Tracking Turtles

Sea turtles make a fascinating subject for study; they have smitten ecologist Kartik Shanker since the '80s

- Kartik Shanker

EVERYONE NEEDS A ROLE MODEL. Mine was the late Satish Bhaskar, considered the pioneer of sea turtle biology and conservation in India.

I was first smitten by a sea turtle in the late '80s; by then, Satish was already a legend.

He had surveyed all of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands for sea turtle nesting beaches, spent five months by himself on uninhabited Suheli Island in the Lakshadweep to count green turtle nests, and travelled to West Papua Indonesia to count and tag leatherbacks.

in Satish was carrying on a turtle tradition that had begun a decade earlier. When sea turtle pioneers like Archie Carr in the Americas, George Hughes in South Africa, George Balazs in Hawaii and Col Limpus in Australia started their research on these enigmatic marine animals,they realised they could learn nothing about them in a season or two, or even a decade.

On the Turtle Trail

These long-lived, late-maturing species had complicated life cycles. Hatchlings, few of which survived, made slow transoceanic journeys on currents and gyres for many years. After a decade or more, they migrated thousands of kilometres across ocean basins to nest on the beaches where they were born.

Insight into how their populations changed over time or responded to increasing human impact would need decades of data. So these stalwarts started long-term monitoring programmes at critical nesting beaches on different continents that have been running for over 50 years. For example, the monitoring of green turtles at Tortuguero in Costa Rica started in the 1950s, loggerhead turtles at Mon Repos in Queensland and leatherback turtles in South Africa in the mid-1960s.

A Lifelong Connection