The teenage olive ridley sea turtle was just fifteen as she waited 500 yards offshore in the tropical warm eastern Pacific ocean off Ostional Beach in a small country that, more than 500 years earlier, Christopher Columbus had discovered and named "Costa Rica", the "rich coast." She was sexually mature this year and would soon join one hundred million nesting generations before her on the same small beach they had visited.
The afternoon October rains had passed as she waited expectantly. In its final quarter now, the moon was having an unseen effect upon her.
As it has done for uncountable eons, the moon was gracing the earth with its seemingly everlasting phases. Though she could not know it, it was drawing this olive ridley turtle ashore. She was not alone. At first, a few yards away another Pacific sea turtle joined her, then a third, followed by a dozen, then hundreds, thousands, now tens of thousands of marine sea turtles. For more than one hundred million years it had been thus: vast migrations of ancient creatures, culminating when the moon was in this phase.
Only a few months ago, this marine turtle was living in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Indeed, in March, an ocean tramper ship had passed her more than 2,500 miles offshore. On that same day, the tens of thousands now alongside her had been distributed over more than a million square kilometers. But, life is forever mysterious and this year was no exception.
Even though there was plenty of food, something more powerful had begun to stir inside her and hundreds of thousands more of her kind. Whatever it was, they all felt the same timeless need to return to Ostional Beach. You see, it was at Ostional that they first had hatched.
Now, as she waited in the soft moonlight, she was ready. Over the thousands of miles she had swum she had been bred by several different males in the clear tropical waters because, somehow, they, too, were being affected by something unseen, a force primeval. It was something so compelling that it had been bringing her species back to Ostional Beach since before the first dinosaur.
In the tropical night this olive ridley sea turtle was waiting. She had somehow found to the very beach where she had hatched in 1995. We do not know how an olive ridley sea turtle finds the exact beach where it started life. There are only a few nesting beaches on earth and they are not very large. In fact Ostional Beach is only a few hundred meters long. Now part of Costa Rica's Ostional National Wildlife Refuge, it is almost certainly the most important olive ridley marine turtle nesting site on the planet.
Wonderfully, in 1995, the year this turtle hatched, some half a million female olive pacific sea turtles had come ashore to nest here in huge waves. These massive invasions are called "arribadas."
Unfortunately, our sea turtle's mother will not join her to nest at Ostional this year even though for 23 years she had been part of massive Ostional arribadas every year. Not long ago, she drowned in an illegal shrimping net on her way back to the ancient nesting grounds. It was a needless waste since it could have been avoided by the simple use of an internationally required, but typically ignored, law requiring a turtle escape device.
Thousands more were destroyed in what is euphemistically called "incidental catch" by long line fishermen who refuse to use larger hooks that would prevent tragedy to this ancient creature.
Also, no one knows how many thousands died needlessly by eating carelessly discarded plastic bags. And, of course, there has been the wanton pillaging of nests: millions and millions of eggs from just a few small, precious beaches.
Of course, the hundreds of thousands of olive ridleys just offshore do not know any of this.
In the soft, silent moonlight, we can see them even though they are nearly half a mile away. There are now so many gathered that it almost seems one could walk on their backs for a mile or more and never get a wet foot. We can only gaze in awe and wonder as they gather silently.
These ancient mariners will never know that they were here long before there was a dinosaur walking the earth. They cannot appreciate our capacity for destruction or efforts at preservation. They only know that this little stretch of beach is where they've always come.
Then, though no one knows why, it happens. As quietly as they first appeared, as silently as they gathered, their patience has been rewarded and they begin to come ashore.
A single olive ridley turtle followed by a second. Then there are hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands---even more than that---each intent on one task: bringing new life. All night they come. And all day, day after day.
It is a wonder of magnificent Costa Rica and as timeless as the phases of the moon. It is the spectacular display of life called Arribada.
