Celebrating our wins - we've raised the healthiest and strongest baby turtles ever!
We've weathered some devastating blows this year, but we try to take inspiration from the way the jungle constantly renews itself. Even as we experience loss, signs of new life are everywhere.
For almost a decade, the Tapiche Reserve has been rescuing turtle eggs that would otherwise be sold on the black market. During this time, we’ve learned invaluable lessons about how best to incubate and protect the eggs for the greatest hatching success rate. This year, even with all of the challenges of the global pandemic, we’ve managed to achieve our highest hatching success rate to date — between 85-90%!
This turtle nesting season, with the financial help of the GoFundMe campaign set up by our dear friend Louisa, we were able to collect approx 8,000 turtle eggs. We scoured the beaches for eggs every day and night of the 3-month laying season and brought them back to the lodge. We transported about a ton of the finest and softest sand from the beaches in buckets and sacks, and we built the best turtle hatchery yet, reconstructing the turtle nests to have the physical structure that we’ve observed mother turtles building in the wild. The eggs were protected from the elements and yet were formed such that the babies could easily crawl out when they were ready. We took extra precautions to protect against natural predators snakes, opossums, lizards, birds, and rodents. We now have a much better understanding of the timing of when the babies are ready to come out, and we make sure we’re ready to receive them.
This video shows some of the first hatchlings of the season being released back to the wild. They grew quickly and were ready for release earlier than in any other year.
In addition to the Taricaya turtle (Podocnemis unifilis) and Cupiso (Podocnemis sextuberculata), this is the first year that we have successfully fostered several Charapa turtle hatchlings (Podocnemis expansa), a vulnerable species that can grow to be more than a meter long!
We still have thousands of baby turtles s at the reserve scheduled for release in the next few months, so it’s not to late to help via our GoFundMe!