A new documentary lends a helping hand in a community’s fight to save the Olive Ridley turtle Premium

Every year, scores of female olive ridley turtles swim across the oceans, traversing thousands of miles of open sea to return to the beaches where they were born. Here, they construct a nest in the sand with their hind flippers, deposit their eggs in them and return to the ocean, leaving these eggs, which take 40-45 days to hatch, unattended.

Every year, scores of female Olive Ridley turtles swim across the oceans, traversing thousands of miles of open sea to return to the beaches where they were born. Here, they construct a nest in the sand with their hind flippers, deposit their eggs in them and return to the ocean, leaving these eggs, which take 40-45 days to hatch, unattended.

The beaches of Honnavar in the Uttara Kannada district of Karnataka are among the few nesting sites of the olive ridleys in the country. Vikhar Ahmed Sayeed remembers walking across a kilometre-long stretch of shore in this region, trying to spot the sand-swathed nests of these aquatic reptiles. “I counted 31 clutches of eggs,” says the award-winning journalist, while moderating a panel discussion held at the Bangalore International Centre (BIC) in Bengaluru, earlier this week. Since each of those clutches held around 100 eggs “there must have been 3000 eggs over there,” he reminisces.

The discussion, which included filmmaker Vikas Badiger of the Faces of Bengaluru (FoB) Media Group, Sandeep Hegde of the Honnavar Foundation and Rajesh Govind Tandel, a member of the fishing community from a village in Honnavar, followed the screening of a new documentary titled The Ocean Connection.

The evocative film, made by FoB Media and supported by the Honnavar Foundation, explores the symbiotic relationship between the fishing community in Honnavar and these unique sea turtles. It also delves into a 2010 decision of the Karnataka government to build a port alongside an estuary of the Sharavati River and the danger this will pose to both the turtles and the livelihoods of the fishers in the region. “It is clear that this is a huge problem,” says Vikhar, recalling how the row of nests he observed was located precisely where the proposed port was supposed to come up. “And it has been going on for a long time, 14 years now.”

Turtle Talk

The olive ridley is the smallest of the seven extant species of sea turtles and the most abundant, dwelling in the tepid waters of the Pacific, Indian, and Atlantic oceans. The animal, classified as ‘Vulnerable’ by the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN), takes its name from its distinctive yellow-green or olive hue of its rounded carapace or upper shell. While the actual number of individuals in the wild is unknown, it is estimated that there are around 800,000 nesting females, a number which is fast declining due to poaching, accidental entanglement in trawl nets and dissipating nesting sites.

While the beaches of Rushikulya and Gahirmatha in Odisha are the world’s largest mass nesting sites, other smaller ones exist along both the Malabar and Coromandel coastlines, including in Honnavar. “I have seen these turtles from my childhood,” says Rajesh, who hails from the village of Tonka 1 in Honnavar.