Highlights, Mysteries & First Times – What happened in 2024

It has been few weeks only since we shut down the 2024/25 MEMANTA season. So it is time to tell you guys about all the amazing things that have happened.
I can certainly say that this has been our most successful and most expensive sea turtle season so far. Details will follow shortly…

Buckle up, grab your drink, lean back and keep reading… 📖

A new Hatchery… again

Once again it was time to expand our hatchery, even if it was just for a mere 2 metres. But we re-did the whole thing:
(1) We buried a black plastic fence around 40 cm deep all around the hatchery which is sturdier and more durable than the mesh,
(2) We renewed all the posts and even the wooden door as termites and rain had basically destroyed the former ones.

The new hatchery was built in mid July with the help of our first interns, Kim and Fiona from Luxembourg! These were our first guests ever from this small country and they were truly wonderful people who enjoyed themselves very much I think 🙂

As always, we put some shade over the hatchery, but around one third was left in the sun in order to create different temperature regimes and a hopefully balanced sex ratio for our hatchlings.

All our other buildings stayed the same but they look as lovely as ever…. don’t you think?

Kids Afternoons

Thanks to the engagement of Andrea, our third intern in 2024 and an aspirational teacher from Austria, we started with our Saturday Kids Afternoons.

Initially, Andrea was giving educational talks in spanish to the kids about geography and climate change – things they had never heard about 😟
After she had left, we continued to give english classes and everyone, from age 6 to 20, was welcome. We usually had between 6 and 15 kids around and the group was wildly mixed. First, they would be learning new words and useful phrases for one hour, then we would go to the beach where they played soccer or simply ran around and had fun.

I really hope we can continue this program next season with the help of our new interns!

What the… weather?

Just as there’s no winter and no summer in Europe that is exactly the same, there is no rainy or dry season in Nicaragua that is identical.

In 2024, we had a very wet June with the first inundations and the lagoon next to our property opening up, then a normally wet September and a bone-dry October that left everyone astonished. We all thought the rainy season had ended very early – when we got surprised by major rain around mid November and everything was wet, moldy and mosquitoe-y again 🌧️

This last indundation at the very end of the rainy season was so heavy that the groundwater lever reached some of our deeper nests in the hatchery! As a result, we had a lot of dead embryos that suffocated as the water had replaced all the oxygen within the sand 😦
… whereas a few weeks earlier, I had to irrigate the nests because the sand was too hot and too dry!

Well, the weather plays crazy sometimes and you need to be prepared for everything.

Just take a look at this wonderful graph displaying rain, air temperature, beach temperatures and nest temperatures all in one, where you can exactly see how the big rain events drove down the temperatures for a couple of days!

Rio is tamed

It’s funny when locals get surprised that our horse does not run away from us. He listens up when you call his name, responds with an excited neigh and comes directly to you.

That’s something new for the Venecians who have always been struggeling with loving and caring for their animals. However, it’s not our pats that do the trick, but the good old treats… Rio thinks he’s getting something good whenever I call him, which is sometimes the case – but sometimes he needs to work instead 😉

This past season, we’ve had several interns who dared to ride on Rio as they were familar with horses. Some even took him out on night patrols… which was another MEMANTA FIRST in 2024: Horse patrols 🏇🏻

And after a few unsuccessful patrols, Rio did really find a nesting mama turtle. Maybe he just needed some warming up and will bring us more nests in 2025/26!

I really hope we can get him a companion soon… ❤

Below are some pictures from our horseback riding trips which are part of our free-time activities.

Many Nest Sponsors, as usual

Gladly we received quite a few nest sponsorships this past sea turtle season – mostly from previous contributors, my parents’ friends and our interns’ families. Thanks so much! We could never save as many nests as we’d like to if it wasn’t for your help!

I’m pretty sure we took some awesome pictures and videos of the hatchlings and we made a lot of people happy with theoutcome of their sponsorship.

If you want to donate a nest for the upcoming season, please click here https://memanta.org/get-involved/help-from-home/

And of course I need to mention our ongoing friendship with the MSV Nicaragua, a german organisation that has been running a hatchery at a close-by beach for over 10 years now. It’s great that we can continuously rely on their support and their insights on turtle conservation (yes, they have the same problems as we do, but they manage to have a better average hatching success – wow!)

Sadly, their visit to MEMANTA was cut short because of the weather conditions and logistics, but we managed to visit them in Los Zorros and we were more people than usual – four interns, two locals, Mama and Papa Berg, plus me!
Thanks for putting up with such a diverse group, and for all the help and support in 2024.

Happy Dogs and Cats, as usual

Another year has passed by without any illnesses or fatalities, and I am so happy about it! My cats are growing old as they’re keeping me company whenever I’m sitting at the laptop (I’ve got the white one – Reina – right here here now) or chilling in my bed. I really enjoy their quiet company!
They don’t have much of an adventurous spirit as they mostly stay around the house and so they are rarely seen by our interns.
Also, Twix is missing in those pictures as she is living her best life avoiding the cameras 😺

And then of course there’s crazy Gulasch and Grandpa Milo, pictured below with his toy turtle. They are always walking by your side unless they’re deep asleep. They like to chase after motorbikes, horses and birds, they watch over our interns sleeping at the camp site, and they guard the entrance to our property pretty damn well.

Sometimes they’re annoying but it’s impossible to not love them. Too bad that all their human friends from 2024 have left now and they’re stuck with me again….

Fun times in and out of the water

The good and the bad thing about Venecia is that there’s really not much to do.

Whenever our interns are not working or somewhat involved in another project, they have time to kill.
Most spend their free-time in the hammock, reading, daydreaming, playing games, talking with their companions… and others spend hours on the beach – not so much for sunbathing, but for using the internet on their phone 😉

Even though MEMANTA is a wonderful place, there comes a time though when you want to get out and do something exciting. That’s why we have our activity program in place.

In 2024, we offered the following activities:

• Bodyboarding
• Swimming in the estuary
• Mangrove Mud walk
• Boat ride through the mangroves
• Horseback riding to the end of the beach
• Motorbike trip to the other end of the beach
• and if possible, a tour up the Cosigüina volcano and a boat fun trip to a small island

On top of that, I strongly recommend to keep traveling through Nicaragua after the internship. I mean, you already made the long way in the airplane and spent so much money, you might as well just add one week to your itinerary to at least see the highlights of Nicaragua 🌋

And there is nothing to be afraid about… Nicaragua is no wild jungle and no war zone. It is just a country where things work a little bit differently than you’re used to, but if you stick to the tourist hotspots like León or Granada, you have english-speaking people, perfectly tailored tours, western food and western standards for your convenience and piece of mind 🙃

Dear Cosigüina…

You’re such a wonderful destination. As a volcano you’re pretty lame, but you offer fantastic views over the surrounding landscape and our neighbouring countries. Famous for your water-filled caldera, you are a really nice hiking spot (even though there’s only one real hiking trail I know about and you need to take the same way up and down…)

But why is it becoming so difficult to visit you?

First of all, a new regulation states that everyone visiting the Nature Reserve must travel with a guide with a special permit… but no one in this area has this permit! And no guide from the area speaks english or has a truck to drive my interns up to the start of the trail… so in the end, I guide them. And I will definitely not pay a tour company from León 3 hours away to visit a volcano that is basically right at my doorstep…?

And second, the road up there has become pretty bad. But maybe it will be repaired some time? I hope the tour to the Cosigüina can stay part of our activity program, but it must be made easier to access…

Turtles!!! What else?

The sea turtles of Venecia are full of mysteries. That’s nothing new, but I wish I could finally discover their secrets…

The season for Olive Ridley turtles started later and slower than usual, and the nesting activity kept beeing average until the very end. It was not only my personal feeling – comparing it to my experiences from previous years – but also the belief of the local egg collectors that the 2024 season was ‘bad’.

The lower nesting activity was also reflected in the market value of the eggs: We paid on average double the price!
During the high season in October, the price for a dozen eggs would usually be 60 Córdobas, but this year it was between 80 and 120 Córdobas 💸

Another factor that drives the market value up is increased protection of the eggs – as more nests are bought by projects, less are available on the market.
In the end, the consumers decide how much money they will want to spend on turtle eggs. But if turtle eggs become an exclusive delicacy for the rich, we will never reach this threshold.

So in the end, we spent a lot more money for purchasing nests than we intended to. I really hope this won’t be the new standard, as it is financially unsustainable for us.

And YES, we did find some turtle mamas on our own, but in the end it was only 16. The other 161 nests were bought from the local egg collectors. Which is funny and depressing at the same time, as we are on the beach EVERY night doing our 3 hours of patrol, and most of the time we even did two to three patrols in one night.

But somehow someone is always faster than us. This is a topic that has been bothering me since day 1, because I still cannot wrap my head around as to why we are so unlucky finding turtles on our patrols. Plus every year the competition gets worse and there are more and more people and less turtles…

I mean, we are not the only ones who struggle to find turtles. Some of the local guys stay up all night long, walk up and down and up and down, and eventually find one nest per week. But the money they get from selling one nest is enough to keep their spirits up.

For us, it is getting damn expensive to save sea turtles in Nicaragua. I wish I knew the magic formula how to find more nests so we can cut back on our expenses. But every year, it is a new challenge…

At least the babies didn’t let us down in 2024: The hatching success was significantly better than last year!
The Hawksbill nests were on the lower average as usual with a 50% success rate, but the Olive Ridleys had a good 80% success rate. The mean value was negatively affected by a few nests that didn’t hatch at all, but the proportion of nests with over 80% and even over 90% was satisfyingly high.

There’s nothing that makes me happier than seeing 102 hatchlings emerge from a nest that had 104 eggs! But of course there’s always those nests that have a low percentage: Sometimes you have a lot of undeveloped eggs, sometimes you have a lot of embryos that died mid-term and sometimes there are even dead hatchlings in the sand that didn’t get to the surface in time.

That’s why we always try to keep a good control of when the nests are due. If they are overdue or the hatchlings seem to have trouble, we help them out of the sand and release them right before sunset. These are the cases when those pictures happen:

But don’t be fooled by our beautiful day-time hatchling release photos: Most of our releases happen at night, as it is naturally intended.

Hatchery achievements 2024

This past season, we tried once more a combination of “ground nests” and “bag nests”. And it worked out wonderfully! There doesn’t seem to be a significant difference in terms of overall hatching success, but every method has its own advantages and inconveniences, and we just like the mix. I think we finally found the way to go forward.

And I personally think that the current hatchery looks extra beautiful and neat and organized 💞 Just see for yourself:

The final statistics for 2024/25 are still in the making (remember: four nests haven’t hatched yet!) but I can already share some *fun* insights with you:

• the first Hawksbill nest came on the 12th of July; the first Olive Ridley nest on the 7th of August; the first Green Turtle nest on the 8th of November
• the busiest night was 21st of October with 5 nests being relocated between 7:30 and 10 pm
• our best egg collector sold us 12 nests altogether
• the MEMANTA team found 16 nests and collected 32 more nests (that were found by egg collectors) while the turtle was laying
  • that means we had 48 turtle sightings on the beach and we bought 129 nests during the hatchery guard shifts
• mosts nests were brought by foot ( >70), followed by motorbike ( >50)
• we had three nests with 0% hatching success, and only one with a 100%
• over 450 baby sea turtles didn’t make it on their own to the surface and were rescued upon exhumation – they would have probably died otherwise
• over 3000 unhatched eggs were opened for further examination and most of them were without any embryonic development, just pure egg yolk

Even though the turtles of Venecia stay a mystery and give me more forehead wrinkles every year, I am so looking forward to next season. Because every season feels unique and exciting…. it’s like starting a new romance every year and not knowing what is going to happen, but hoping that your past experiences will guide and enlighten you ❤

Get to know our wonderful interns!

In early 2024 I did some more advertising at the european universities and some were pretty responsive. In the end, there were 17 courageous young students and alumni from Germany, Austria, Luxembourg and the Netherlands that traveled to Nicaragua and did their professional internship with us!

And once again, I got to know some truly interesting characters, wonderful people, great adventurers, world-changers and conservationists-to-be. People who dare to skip the office and travel into the real world, confront themselves with the real problems, get to know real hands-on work.

Sometimes I still feel like in a dream when I walk up on those young people sitting in the Rancho over dinner, talking about their eventful day and making jokes and laughing, and I realize that they are here because of MY EFFORT. And if nobody says it, I don’t care – I am super proud of myself and happy that I made it that far!

Below are some impressions of our work in the hatchery

Also, we had several interns who did their own little research or data analysis project and I found the different approaches and ideas very exciting.
Hannah, for example, did a “fitness test” with newly emerged hatchlings, Chloë elaborated some wonderful temperature and climate graphs, and thanks to Emma we finally have a map with all the nesting sections along the beach!

To end this blogpost, let me share with you our MEMANTA FIRSTS in 2024:

• first guests from Luxembourg and the Netherlands
• first english classes for the local kids
• first horse patrols
• first season with more than 5 interns at a time
• first season with more male than female interns at a time
• first season fully booked from 1st of July until 31st of January

And what about me?

Well, I’m still here… always present, trying to make everything work, enjoying my turtle paradise and getting anxious about future stuff.

I work online whenever I have the chance to, but during turtle high season it has become increasingly difficult to find enough time for my freelance job because MEMANTA is basically a full-time job when both volunteers and turtles require my attention!

Now, during the months that lie ahead, it will just be me and my partner, and it feels oddly empty and quiet… This is something I’ve never quite liked about the seasons here – you have 6 months of pure craziness, people, turtles, rain, chaos and everything coming together without a day of rest, and then 6 months of loneliness, nothing, silence and time for overthinking.

But the dry season is absolutely necessary to rest and reflect, do all the paperwork and legal stuff, build and repair things, create new activities and develop new ideas.
This property needs constant maintenance and our animals need constant care. Also, I feel that every year the bureaucracy is becoming heavier and the authorities want more and more permits for everything…

I still hope that MEMANTA can become bigger soon and attract visitors from all kinds of countries who don’t want the casual touristic beach experience but something deeper, something more challenging, something more satisfying…

It is hard to build an imperium when this whole operation is basically a one-woman-show. The struggle is real… but this is what keeps me alive ❤