Skip to main content

When turtles die


From David Troeger
There is a Malayalam story in which the protagonist tells another character, “You know, the female turtles are the most unfortunate creatures on earth. They are denied the delights of motherhood. They can’t lay their eggs in the ocean where they live most of their lives. They rush to the beach to lay the eggs and rush back to save themselves from men. The eggs hatch under nature’s care. The mother won’t ever see her little ones. She can’t love them, can’t fondle them, won’t even see them. They are the saddest mothers among all creatures.”

There are seven different species of sea turtles now. They are all endangered species and three of them are critically so. All of them are born on some beach where their mothers lay the eggs only to depart instantly in horror of the human species for whom turtle soup is a delicacy, turtle shells become decorative items, and turtle eggs are “absolutely delicious” low calorie meals.

Nature’s temperature hatches the turtle’s eggs. There’s something very curiously interesting about this hatching too. If the eggs are hatched at a temperature below 29 degree Celsius, the hatchlings will be male. Between 29 and 34 degrees, they will be female. And above 34, the eggs won’t hatch. Climate change has driven the temperatures well above 34 in many beaches so that turtles are being driven to near-extinction.

 Another curious fact about turtles is that the hatchlings move to the waters on their own. They have no mothers or adults to guide them. They discover the water and travel kilometres in it. They are highly migratory creatures that live mostly in the ocean waters. They come ashore rarely – just to bask or to lay eggs. The female turtles return to the same beach where they were born in order to lay eggs, years after their birth. Aren’t they amazing creatures?

These amazing and cute creatures are likely to become extinct because of human beings. These creatures which appeared on the earth 2 billion years before mankind did will be driven to their end by mankind! Climate change is one of the chief causes.

Plastic is another. Some time back when a dead turtle was subjected to autopsy, nearly 2 kg of plastic was found in its intestines. Once a turtle was found dead with one end of a plastic rope jutting out of its mouth and the other end out of its anus. We, yes you and I, have dumped 5.25 trillion macro and micro pieces of plastic in the oceans. They weigh 269,000 tons. Every day around 8 million pieces of plastic make their way into the oceans. Isn’t it time to think of abandoning plastic as far as possible? For the sake of the turtles, fishes, and other creatures in those waters?

The protagonist of the Malayalam story mentioned at the beginning of this post tells the other character, “I’m leaving this world of people. I’m going to live on an island which is just as big as a football ground but is uninhabited by people and where turtles come to lay eggs. Like Suheli. Like Mu Ko And Thong. Like many others without names and without maps. I will live on one of them. When the climate change heats up the earth and the island sinks under water, I will sink too.”

Mankind will sink. After killing almost everything else with their foul deeds. But there’s still time to check our deeds, to correct ourselves.

PS. This post is part of Blogchatter’s CauseAChatter.

Comments

  1. Valid points. Sad but true.
    Human-beings have dumped so much plastic everywhere and caused pollution.
    Turtles and so many creatures- both in sea & on land- are endangered.
    may better sense prevail.

    Odisha has Olive Ridley turtles. Gahirmatha & Rushikulya are famous nesting-places. There is Govt & local support to ensure safe hatching.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yes, there are many agencies now that take care of this problem. Much is being done though a lot more has to be done.

      Delete
  2. Hari OM
    The time we have is eqiuvalent to one minute and forty seconds to midnight so better get busy resetting our approach... Lovely post, Tomichan. YAM xx

    ReplyDelete
  3. Although I'm angry at the state of our planet and mankind's greedy hand at work--I'm of the view that we're the dinosaurs that will be extinct soon-ish, but this beautiful planet of ours will bounce back.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yes, our planet has a way of being reborn. I believe that too.

      Delete
  4. I feel sad and angry that we always are the root cause of all evils. Though a lot is being done but it is always less than what needs to be done to save planet earth. Somehow, I feel we are heading towards our own end and this planet will survive.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Always less than what's needed. That's the point. India os a fine example. In one breath we preach environment protection and order mining of forests... A lot more hypocrisy and chicanery.

      Delete
  5. ஃஃIf the eggs are hatched at a temperature below 29 degree Celsius, the hatchlings will be male. Between 29 and 34 degrees, they will be female.ஃஃ - Interesting. Thank you.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

The Second Crucifixion

  ‘The Second Crucifixion’ is the title of the last chapter of Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins’s magnum opus Freedom at Midnight . The sub-heading is: ‘New Delhi, 30 January 1948’. Seventy-three years ago, on that day, a great soul was shot dead by a man who was driven by the darkness of hatred. Gandhi has just completed his usual prayer session. He had recited a prayer from the Gita:                         For certain is death for the born                         and certain is birth for the dead;                         Therefore over the inevitable                         Thou shalt not grieve . At that time Narayan Apte and Vishnu Karkare were moving to Retiring Room Number 6 at the Old Delhi railway station. They walked like thieves not wishing to be noticed by anyone. The early morning’s winter fog of Delhi gave them the required wrap. They found Nathuram Godse already awake in the retiring room. The three of them sat together and finalised the plot against Gand

Cats and Love

No less a psychologist than Freud said that the “time spent with cats is never wasted.” I find time to spend with cats precisely for that reason. They are not easy to love, particularly if they are the country variety which are not quite tameable, and mine are those. What makes my love affair with my cats special is precisely their unwillingness to befriend me. They’d rather be in their own company. “In ancient time, cats were worshipped as gods; they have not forgotten this,” Terry Pratchett says. My cats haven’t, I’m sure. Pratchett knew what he was speaking about because he loved cats which appear frequently in his works. Pratchett’s cats love independence, very unlike dogs. Dogs come when you call them; cats take a message and get back to you as and when they please. I don’t have dogs. But my brother’s dogs visit us – Maggie and me – every evening. We give them something to eat and they love that. They spend time with us after eating. My cats just go away without even a look af

The Final Farewell

Book Review “ Death ends life, not a relationship ,” as Mitch Albom put it. That is why, we have so many rituals associated with death. Minakshi Dewan’s book, The Final Farewell [HarperCollins, 2023], is a well-researched book about those rituals. The book starts with an elaborate description of the Sikh rituals associated with death and cremation, before moving on to Islam, Zoroastrianism, Christianity, and finally Hinduism. After that, it’s all about the various traditions and related details of Hindu final rites. A few chapters are dedicated to the problems of widows in India, gender discrimination in the last rites, and the problem of unclaimed dead bodies. There is a chapter titled ‘Grieving Widows in Hindi Cinema’ too. Death and its rituals form an unusual theme for a book. Frankly, I don’t find the topic stimulating in any way. Obviously, I didn’t buy this book. It came to me as quite many other books do – for reasons of their own. I read the book finally, having shelv

Vultures and Religion

When vultures become extinct, why should a religion face a threat? “When the vultures died off, they stopped eating the bodies of Zoroastrians…” I was amused as I went on reading the book The Final Farewell by Minakshi Dewan. The book is about how the dead are dealt with by people of different religious persuasions. Dead people are quite useless, unless you love euphemism. Or, as they say, dead people tell no tales. In the end, we are all just stories made by people like the religious woman who wrote the epitaph for her atheist husband: “Here lies an atheist, all dressed up and no place to go.” Zoroastrianism is a religion which converts death into a sordid tale by throwing the corpses of its believers to vultures. Death makes one impure, according to that religion. Well, I always thought, and still do, that life makes one impure. I have the support of Lord Buddha on that. Life is dukkha , said the Enlightened. That is, suffering, dissatisfaction and unease. Death is liberation