At least four endangered Olive Ridley sea turtles, who were earlier tagged to study their migration behaviour, have reappeared for mass nesting on the sandy Gahirmatha beach, officials said on Tuesday.
“On 12 March night, we spotted four female turtles at Nasi-2 nesting ground with metallic tags fitted on their flippers. More than 5 lakh turtles have already laid eggs at the world’s largest rookery of sea turtles since 9 March,” said Bichitrnanda Behera, a forest range officer of Gahirmatha.
The figure may be on the higher side as locating the tagged turtle amidst lakhs of these animals under darkness was a Herculean task. There is every possibility of more tagged turtles turning up to lay eggs in the coming days.
The state Forest Department and Wildlife Institute of India had earlier tagged the turtles with metallic labels to keep a tab on their pre- and post-breeding migration route.
The re-sighted turtles were tagged in 2021 at Gahirmatha by the Zoological Survey of India (ZSI). The reappearance of tagged turtles at Gahirmatha bears testimony to the fact that female turtles often come to the same beach to lay their eggs, said Basudev Tripathy, a turtle researcher and a senior scientist of the Zoological Survey of India, Western Regional Center, Pune.
A tagged sea turtle was sighted at the Beruwala beach in Sri Lanka on 12 January this year. The female turtle was tagged on 2 April 2022 at the rookery of Rushikulya in Odisha ‘s Ganjam district .
Tagging is most often conducted to obtain information on reproductive biology, movements and growth rates. The tagging helps researchers in studying the turtle’s migratory route and areas of foraging, officials said.
ZSI fitted metallic tags on the flippers of around 3,000 turtles in the last three the last three years at Rushikulya and Gahirmatha nesting grounds during the mass nesting of these aquatic animals. All the tags are marked with ZSI, Kolkata markings, added Tripathy.