by Carl Safina
Hours pass. Meanwhile, enveloping darkness reinforces the resolve of egg-bearing turtles. Now is the peak of a nesting season that starts in April and will run through September. For those readying to lay, the night blackness intensifies their mysterious motivation to enter the strange and difficult world of air, to undergo the ordeal of bringing forth new life.
Sometime near midnight, Julie Rocho is belly-down on the beach, her hand over the front of a flashlight, allowing just a little bit of brightness to escape through her fingers. The night sea wind is blowing her hair from the edges of her kerchief. I kneel.
The turtle Julie’s watching has excavated a body-sized pit and dug a remarkable, almost perfectly cylindrical egg chamber about a foot wide and half again as deep. Her wind-dried shell looks dull. She has a small, grape-sized tumor at the base of her tail.
Every twenty seconds or so, her shell and tail dip down, her rear flippers flex inward just slightly, and she sighs with exertion. With each labored squeeze, two or three eggs fall from her. The gleaming eggs—a bit leathery, coated with mucus—look like large Ping-Pong balls. As minutes pass, her eggs pile up in the exquisite chamber.
What perception, what emotion, has made her do this? Does she have a suddenly irresistible yearning; is she somehow smitten with the urge to feel solid land beneath her stiff shell? What feeling draws her first to these faraway islands, then inexorably up and onto the beach, to exhaust herself digging and pressing her body into the sand, to lay eggs she will never even see, bearing young she will never know?
Only about half the Green Turtles that ascend a nesting beach will actually lay eggs that night. They’ll keep emerging on other nights, and eventually each female will lay about four times in her season, about one hundred eggs at a time. Then she’ll abstain from nesting for about three years.
When we’ve been lying with her half an hour, the turtle pauses for a couple of minutes. Now she moves very slowly forward, just a little. Using her rear flippers she begins gently mounding and patting loose sand over her eggs; a move Julie calls “patty-caking.” Her rear flippers are surprisingly nimble and sensitive, working deftly, like hands in mittens.
She rests a few minutes, then continues the patty-caking. She seems a tired beast. Julie yawns. I notice a meteor. A frigatebird flies slowly by, in dark silhouette.
Twenty minutes later, our big turtle suddenly shifts gears, seemingly filled with a new energy. She’s beginning the final phase of nest completion: filling in the entire body pit. Her first three long, powerful, flinging strokes lift so much sand that much of it lands far past the great depression she’s trying to fill.
Everything about a turtle seems slow and measured except its efforts in digging. She is chopping into the ground as though swimming into the sands. Her front flippers, biting in vigorously like propellers, are snapping to the power stroke, slapping her shell startlingly. Each snap showers us with sand and small stones. When her flippers strike a large coral chunk, her nail and scales produce a sound that sends shivers, like a shovel scraping along a rock. After a few tries against this obstacle she stops chopping and rests. Resolute, but not foolish, she pivots for softer purchase. She is working with much exertion. She’s making an energetic chop with her foreflippers every two to five seconds, then after a set of about three to five such chops she’s spending half a minute to a minute resting.
Julie says, “Everything together usually takes around two hours; making the body pit, digging the egg chamber, laying, patty-caking, and backfilling. But we see turtles up longer than that, because—I don’t know—they’re picky. They do a lot of digging and moving before they finally decide on a spot to nest. Or sometimes afterward, they’re so exhausted they fall asleep. I’ve seen them stay sleeping all night.”
Seeking shelter from the wind and the path of flying sand, we move into an abandoned body pit. I raise my hood against the damp sea breeze. Julie’s sitting with her legs pulled up and her arms around her shins, resting her head on her knees. I ask if she’s warm enough. She says yes, but she seems chilly. Slowed to turtle time, we continue our sleepy vigil under a sky crowded with stars.
At one A.M., our turtle has moved slightly forward and is now pivoting a bit, seemingly trying to level out her job. Each phase in the complex, exacting nesting must satisfy some unknowable, motivating sensation to correctly perform different motions and tasks, in the right sequence. Something in her experience of reality makes her want to spend herself with such exertion, but it’s all done by feel; she never visually inspects her work.
Half a moon emerges from the warm sea as though coming from a naked swim, and starts its pale ascent among light clouds. Moonlight floods the night enough to throw long shadows. It puts a silver outline to the contours of her shell and flippers and head. She continues chopping, thrusting, chopping, thrusting, filling her pit. And in between, she rests, and rests again. Out in the surrounding night, unseen shearwaters are moaning, unseen terns calling overhead. The rhythmic surf breaking. Our minds unwinding.
Taking much longer pauses now, she seems enfeebled with exhaustion. Some of her flipper thrusts are mere waves of her arms. Other thrusts, with gathered strength, still pelt us with pebbles, but now she follows each thrust or two with multiminute rests. I hadn’t realized turtle nesting was this complicated, this arduous.
In this remote corner of night’s run, one night-darkened albatross exercises in the moonlight. But most albatrosses are asleep. Julie, having pulled on some extra clothing from her pack, now lies in the fetal position, in the abandoned turtle pit, down out of the wind, likewise asleep. The turtle pauses longer, then also seems to doze off.
We are all adrift in a dream, in our souls all ancient nomads wandering a great sea, hoping to navigate to some safe harbor, some protected shoreline halfway between eternities; wishing to come at last to a good place, a haven from the troubled world, to rest our burden softly, to bring time to a halt and pass into a deep. secure repose; to feel, “You belong right here, you have done well, and for a while, you can rest.”
Though the breeze may be blustery, it cannot sweep away the moonbeams. At two A.M., Julie rouses yawningly. We decide to move on. Let the sleeping turtle wake in her own moonlit solitude and drag herself to the water in her own ancient time.
WE MAY DREAM with the turtle, but the real effort here is trying to understand why sea turtles are suffering strange new tumors. When Hawaii’s Green Turtles found their name entered under the Endangered Species Act, in 1978, the main listed threats to survival included egg collecting, hunting, hatchlings’ disorientation by artificial lighting on beaches, and by-kill in fisheries. No one thought of tumors.
Someone had found a Green Turtle suffering external tumors in Florida in 1938. But the new disease—fibropapilloma—remained rare until the mid-1980s. Since then, this “Elephant Man-like disease,” as it’s been called, has become increasingly common. Now about 10 percent of these turtles suffer from tumors, and in certain places the percentage is much higher. In Kaneohe Bay near Honolulu, for instance, more than half the turtles carry tumors. Other hot spots exist in Hawaii, and in Florida, Indonesia, and Australia. The disease, first noticed in Greens, now affects several sea turtle species in every ocean.
The tumors can, over time, grow large enough to interfere with swimming or eating. Some turtles get hit by boats because their vision is impaired by tumors growing near their eyes. Fibropapilloma is now the most common cause of death in Hawaiian Green Turtles. It kills mostly immature animals. It rarely goes into remission. Its exact cause remains uncertain, but turtles in more polluted waters suffer more tumors.
Ninety percent of all Hawaii’s Green Turtles migrate hundreds of miles here to French Frigate Shoals to breed, making it an excellent place for research. One nesting turtle tagged here in 1982 returned a couple of years later and was found here again in the mid-1990s. At that time, scientists fitted her with a transmitter before she went back to sea. For the next month the turtle voyaged mostly out of sight of
land, over waters miles deep, and against prevailing winds and currents. During this trek, she averaged one mile an hour. Slow and steady. Eventually she arrived in Kahului Bay on the Waui coast, seven hundred miles from French Frigate Shoals.
The convergence of turtles at French Frigate Shoals from so far and wide makes this an extremely important breeding colony. Female sea turtles almost always lay their eggs on the same shore where they were born decades earlier. This fidelity to place of birth was originally a way of increasing the survival chances for their own young, gifting the eggs and nestlings with the advantage of starting life on a proven beach. Such faithfulness now makes turtles vulnerable to egg gatherers and meat hunters. Turtles have always had predators to contend with, but only humans are systematic and numerous enough to wipe out entire breeding colonies. On Laysan and Lisianski people have killed more turtles than nest there today. This may well account for the disproportional number at French Frigate Shoals. When hunters completely destroy a nesting population, reestablishment may take a thousand years; no one really knows how long because it’s never happened. Hundreds of years is apparently not enough turtle time; turtles have never recolonized rookeries wiped out in the last two hundred years, including Bermuda in the Atlantic and the Caribbean’s enormous Cayman Islands population.
The Cayman Green Turtle rookery was probably the largest that ever existed. Parts of the Caribbean at that time were so full of turtles we cannot really picture it today. Christopher Columbus’s second voyage, in 1493, brought this impression of turtle numbers: “in those twenty leagues … the sea was thick with them … so numerous that it seemed that the ships would run aground on them and were as if bathing in them.” During Columbus’s fourth voyage Ferdinand Columbus described the Cayman Islands as “two very small and low islands, full of turtles, as was all the sea about, so that they looked like little rocks.” He saw the islands full of turtles during the daytime, as we see today only in the Norwest Hawaiian Islands. Of a part of the Caribbean during the 1600s, one Edward Long wrote, “It is affirmed, that vessels, which have lost their latitude in hazy weather, have steered entirely by the noise which these creatures make in swimming.” Recent calculations have estimated the original Cayman Green Turtle population at several million animals. Yet even the Cayman nation was exterminated, never to regroup.
Each existing breeding beach, each remaining population, therefore, is a distinct world treasure. The entire Hawaiian turtle population is geographically isolated and rather small; each year about five hundred female Greens go to nest at French Frigate Shoals, out of a population of about two thousand adult females living throughout all the islands. The good news is that the number of nesters has slowly risen, roughly doubling since the 1970s. Up till then, commercial hunting was depleting the population. Hawaiian restaurants served Green Turtle as recently as the 1970s, and the turtles’ current upward trend reflects the hunting ban. The Hawaii turtle population enjoys the rare privilege of being effectively protected from most human predation and not subjected to drowning in shrimp nets; both things kill many turtles elsewhere. (There’s no shrimp fishery in Hawaii, but Hawaiian turtles aren’t entirely free of fishery problems—some die on longlines.) French Frigate Shoals enjoys the rare distinction of welcoming turtles nesting in increasing numbers, going from moribund to more abundant.
Responding to the news of increases, some people in Hawaii want to start killing turtles. Tumors or not, for certain people it’s a matter of tradtional culture. One native Hawaiian fisherman, William Aila, was quoted in a Honolulu paper saying, “I can remember my uncles catching turtles and my aunties preparing them. But that has been lost over several generations.”
Call me insensitive, but better we lose the recipes than the turtles. Let’s realize that the world has changed and how we’ve crowded it, and how difficult it has become for animals like turtles. Let’s make it our new cultural tradition to be able to afford to leave some things alone, to respect and protect some space for older beings, and to think that sea turtles are more deliciously savored by seeing them alive rather than in a bubbling, troubling stew. But even without hunting, the tumor disease is quite serious. The biggest question is: are these tumors now killing enough turtles, or depressing reproduction enough, to drive turtle populations down again?
DURING THE DAY the only sign of the “turtle people” is last night’s footprints in the beach sand, astride the turtle tracks. They each take turns walking the beach every two hours from sunset till dawn, to locate nesting turtles coming ashore only during darkness. The rest of the team sits up in the barracks all night, waiting alongside the walkie-talkies for a call that says the beachwalker has found a new tumor-bearing turtle and needs help. This research entails long hours of boredom punctuated by irregular bouts of exhausting work. The boredom gets filled with videos and silliness—Julie and Aaron Dietrich have braided each other’s hair—and talk. These all-night vigils are the only time to get to know the turtle crew, which, in addition to Julie, includes Aaron, Vanessa Pepi, and Nick Nickerson. If you’re awake with them, you learn to avoid the kitchen in the dark unless you’re fond of flying cockroaches just slightly smaller than skateboards. Either you will step on one while barefoot, or one will fly across the room and hit you—usually in the face.
Right now, Julie is preparing to circurnambulate the island, gathering her radio and a snack, and stuffing her hair under her kerchief. She’s just had the plaits taken out, leaving her with crimps. Julie jokes, “Yeah, every four days or so I’m going to try a new look.” She closes her eyes and pulls on the ends of her hair in a gesture of mock glamour. Julie’s another of the many army brats that have wandered their way to these islands. In her two dozen years, she’s seen the landscapes of Korea, Italy, Alaska, Virginia, Kansas, Michigan, and Hawaii. “There’re a few other places I’ve lived; but I can’t remember.” Her job experience is similarly wide-ranging. She’s worked in Alaska rehabilitating hawks and eagles injured by everything from airplanes to leg-hold traps, tracked Hawaiian Hawksbill Turtles, and worked for a zoo that sent her into nursing homes. “It’s amazing to see the therapeutic effects animals have on people. Many of the residents couldn’t even feed themselves, and then they’d stroke a bunny and their face would transform.” After earning her bachelor’s degree in natural sciences, she thought she was done with volunteering, but she couldn’t resist the opportunity to come to Tern Island for a four-month stint last fall. “I loved it—loved it.” Now she’s been hired to help study the turtles, and has arranged to get her master’s degree simultaneously. She walks out the doorway and vanishes into the bird-loud night.
Our job now is just to wait, in case she finds a tumored turtle. And so the evening melts along. Vanessa plops onto the couch, and I notice her fondness for asymmetry: one painted fingernail (her left pinkie, painted deep red) and three gold rings in one ear, one in another. She has long, sandy-blond hair and blue eyes. She’s also led a peregrine existence: born in Germany, she attended elementary school in Utah, junior high school in Washington State, and high school in Wisconsin. “For the past two years, I haven’t really been living anywhere—mostly these remote islands.” Now twenty-nine, she’s also here as a graduate student and field assistant on the government-funded study comparing turtles with and without tumors to see if they differ in body condition and contaminant loads, and comparing their eggs’ fat and protein composition and hatching success. One other aspect of the studies is to see whether turtles actually gain contaminants here at French Frigate Shoals, due to pollutants like PCBs leaching from old military matériel.
Also here is Nick Nickerson, an unusually senior (but new) member of the field crew, closing in on fifty and trying to engineer a new career. Another military brat, he grew up in Japan, Seattle, Florida, then Georgia. Nick wanted to be a marine biologist since the second grade, and he took that aspiration to college. But when his father was hospitalized, he quit school to help his mother. That cost him his draft deferment, and he was compelled
to join the military; forced to abandon Mom to defend apple pie. Eventually he did become a marine biologist, surveying shrimp and crab abundance in Georgia waters, mapping seabeds, and managing a national marine sanctuary. “I really liked the work. But I just started getting itchy.” He scratched that itch by moving to the Hawaiian island of Kauai, where, as an ordained minister with an honorary doctorate in divinity—all accomplished via mail with the Universal Life Church out of California—he began performing commercial weddings.
Aaron Dietrich is a youthfully sinewy, ponytailed and bearded blond twenty-seven-year-old whose body adornments include a ring through his left nipple and, on his shoulder, a large, tastefully drawn tattoo with the image of a sea turtle: “Turtle is my ‘aumakua, my spirit guardian. I feel a special connection.” Aaron was raised in Utah and Colorado. After high school he went to the Big Island of Hawaii, where he worked with his father—an artist who sculpts molten lava—for half a dozen years. “Interesting work: we would scoop the lava into wooden molds while it was still two thousand degrees. By the time the lava cooled, the wood was gone, leaving a burned surface texture.” Aaron entered the University of Hawaii but quit a year short of his degree. He worked two summers salmon fishing in Alaska. “At the beginning it was exciting, partly because dealing with anything in large volume can be exciting. But killing so many fish really got to me after a while. And there were other things I found disturbing—like captains and crew shooting at sea lions. I realized that I like biology more than anything; so now I’m back in school.”
