Fishing Frenzy

The teenage olive ridley sea turtle was only 15 years old as she drifted 500 yards offshore in the warm, tropical eastern Pacific ocean off Ostional Beach in a small country that, about 500 years earlier, Christopher Columbus had discovered and named "Costa Rica", the "rich coast."

The moon was in its last quarter. The afternoon December rains had slipped away as she waited expectantly, unaware of the lunar effect bringing her near.

A dozen meters away, a second olive ridley sea turtle joined her, followed by a dozen, then hundreds, thousands, and soon tens of thousands, all waiting patiently. For billions of years the moon has silently passed its timeless phases that affect the world's tides-and today it was bringing her ashore this night, just as it had led her forebears to ancestral nesting beaches for more than 100,000,000 years.

Nature is forever mysterious. Just a few months ago, this turtle was swimming in the middle of the Pacific Ocean nearly 3,000 miles away. And the multitude of sea turtles now alongside her were scattered over more than a million square miles of ocean.

Although there was plenty of food far out in the Pacific, something had begun to stir inside her. Hundreds of thousands like her felt the same timeless need to return to Ostional Beach. They, and she, were all going back to where they had hatched.

Now, months after something inside spoke to her, she waited in the soft light just a few hundred meters from her destination. She had swum so very far but now the silent voice that had led her here told her to wait. She was ready. Over the many weeks and thousands of miles she had swum she had met many different male olive ridley sea turtles in the clear ocean waters and she had bred with several of them because, like her, they too were being affected by something unseen, a primeval force. Whatever it was, it was so compelling that her race had been returning to Ostional Beach since the days of dinosaurs.

This sea turtle was returning somehow to the very beach where had hatched in 1995. No one knows how an olive ridley sea turtle finds the exact beach where she started life. Ostional Beach is only a few hundred meters in length. Now part of Costa Rica's Ostional National Wildlife Refuge, it is maybe the most important olive ridley marine turtle nesting site in the world. Incredibly, the year this turtle hatched, perhaps 500,000 females had nested here in massive "arribadas."

Unfortunately, our sea turtle's mother will not nest at Ostional this year. For the last two decades, her mother had joined massive Ostional arribadas annually and she would have done so again except that she drowned in a shrimping net not fitted with an internationally required turtle escape device. Long-line fishermen killed thousands more in what is politely called "incidental catch" almost completely avoidable simply by using larger hooks. Untold thousands were killed terribly by eating plastic bags.

But, neither our turtle nor the tens of thousands alongside her know none of this. As they gather, they are now so many that it seems one could almost walk on their backs for a mile or more. They don't realize they were on earth long before there was a Tyrannosaurus Rex or that when they lay their eggs on this tiny wildlife refuge, men will lawfully raid their nests and take 1,000,000 eggs in return for protecting the rest of the clutches and preserving the species. They only know this: Ostional is their beach.

Then, though we do not know why, it happens. It is as though the same quiet voice that told them to come and provided unerring directions to a tiny sand beach thousands of miles away, the same silent command that demanded they wait offshore, now tells them it is time to come ashore. As quietly as they first appeared offshore, as silently as they gathered for days and weeks, their patience has been rewarded. They begin to come to the beach. A single olive ridley marine turtle is followed by a second, then another and another. Soon there are hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands---even more than that. All on a particular little beach. They come in increasing numbers all night. More arrive in the day. All day, day after day. It is the magnificent Ostional Arribada of Costa Rica. As timeless as the moon itself, it is the spectacular reaffirmation of life itself.