VELAS, India — Little kids squeal as a baby sea turtle, flippers flapping, lurches toward the water. Tourists applaud as a dozen palm-sized hatchlings stumble into the sea during the Velas Turtle Festival on India’s western coast, where volunteers invite visitors to watch releases from a hatchery.
Volunteers collect eggs from nests — holes females dig with their flippers to lay dozens of eggs — and take them inside hatcheries to protect them from predators such as dogs and gulls. Once the babies hatch, they’re released under supervision so predators on the beach don’t pick them off during the crawl to the sea. Even with these efforts, most will be eaten in the water; only about one out of every 1,000 olive ridleys is likely to reach maturity.
Those slim odds come on top of human pressures that left olive ridleys listed as “vulnerable” by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. For decades, conservationists feared their numbers would collapse in India after turtles were entangled and suffocated in fishing nets, killed at scale for meat and leather, and had their eggs poached. Coastal development also damaged nesting sites.
Kartik Shanker, a leading Indian sea turtle expert and author of From Soup to Superstar, says about 20 years ago conservationists counted no more than 100,000 turtle nests across India. “The threats to olive ridleys were significant, and if they had been allowed to continue unabated, we may have seen the crashes that we were predicting,” he says. “But when some measure of protection was put in place, these turtles have rebounded.” During the past winter’s nesting season, he says conservationists counted about a million nests.
Protection efforts across India include seasonal fishing bans, protected coastal zones and community-led projects like the Velas Turtle Festival. The festival draws visitors who stay in villagers’ homes and gather at daybreak to watch hatchlings head to the sea. Founder Mohan Upadhye, who sports a turtle tattoo reading “save me,” started the festival about a decade ago after conservationists discovered evidence that olive ridleys had returned to the area. He convinced the local council to ban seaside construction to protect nesting sites and set up hatcheries. The festival lasts for the two-month hatching season starting in April.
The project also incentivizes conservation by paying villagers to keep beaches tidy — about the equivalent of $3 per week, festival manager Virendra Ramesh Patel says. That matters: as recently as his grandparents’ generation, locals poached turtle eggs for omelettes. Now conservation draws visitors and small incomes through eco-tourism, and a community ethos around protecting returning females, which will often return to the same beach to lay eggs.
Olive ridleys have a unique nesting behavior: they sometimes nest en masse in synchronized events called arribadas, when thousands may nest on the same beach over days. That makes protecting nesting sites especially important because many surviving females born on a protected beach will return to nest there themselves.
Despite rebounding numbers, grave threats remain. In January, hundreds of dead turtles washed up near Chennai; they appeared to have suffocated in the nets of illegal trawlers. Newer problems include plastic pollution — turtles seem to mistake plastic for jellyfish, a favorite food. Shanker warns that the apparent recovery could prompt pressure to loosen protections: “I can see a Port Development Authority saying, why shouldn’t I build a port here? You said that the ridleys were endangered, but apparently they’re not.”
Shanker hopes conservationists can work with local communities to ensure sustainable benefits from the turtles’ rebound, whether through eco-tourism or carefully managed harvesting practices where appropriate. Much of modern sea turtle conservation in India traces back to one man, Satish Bhaskar, who walked thousands of miles along India’s shorelines to study turtles and created a baseline of data relied on by researchers for decades. A documentary about him, Turtle Walker, was released this year. Director Taira Malaney says she made the film to show “the power of one person to be able to make an impact on such a grand scale.”
Bhaskar mentored a lineage of turtle conservationists that reaches down to Upadhye in Velas. Upadhye says he fell “in love with sea turtles” after helping an environmental charity identify nesting sites in the early 2000s. He now hopes festival visitors will carry the torch of turtle conservation into the future. “This is the time that we have to make future generations aware,” he says. “We have to fight.”
Still, challenges on beaches persist: garbage litters some nesting sites, and festival organizers scramble to keep trash off the sand as tourism grows. Volunteers place nests in protected enclosures and check that hatchlings reach the sea, but once in the ocean turtles face long odds and many human-made hazards.
The rebound of olive ridleys in India is a conservation bright spot born of community action, research and protection measures. It shows recovery is possible, but experts warn that continued vigilance and policy protections are essential to prevent a relapse.