They’ll grow up to be the largest reptiles in the world. But tonight, on the Pacific beaches of Costa Rica, hundreds of Leatherback Sea Turtle babies, only four inches long, will hatch out of eggs the size of golfballs and run out to the sea. I’m Jim Metzner, and this is the Pulse of the Planet, presented by the American Museum of Natural History.
On January nights, the Costa Rican beaches are swarming with Leatherback Sea Turtles. The huge adult females, who are six feet long and weigh one ton, are busy digging their nests and laying their eggs, while tiny hatchlings are digging their way out of their nests and racing to the shore. And, according to Steven Morreale of Cornell University,
“It’s really an exciting time to be on the beach. It’s just great.”
Mr. Morreale has often witnessed the birth of a Leatherback Sea Turtle baby.
“It digs itself out of the nest, comes out, looks around, almost always night time, because if they come in the day, it’s way too hot. They get a fix on where water is and then they all run down to the surf. So you can see as many as a hundred hatchling turtles all following each other, running down to the surfline. They’re like little windup toys. Their little flippers are paddling away and they use that to propel themselves across the sand. And they head out into the surf, and actually that’s the last time we see them for up to many, many years. And maybe, we’ll never see them again. If they’re males, they could go to the ocean and spend their entire life in the ocean. They could be as much as a hundred years, and we’d never know anything about that individual.”
In our next program, we’ll track a Leatherback on its ocean voyage. Pulse of the Planet is presented by the American Museum of Natural History. I’m Jim Metzner.