So we had more nests than ever, more interns than ever, and I have put on some more weight – hence the title “getting bigger” suits so perfectly well to the season 2025. Haha!
But jokes aside… Here is my rundown of events and I hope I don’t miss any that are worth mentioning.
Off-season: Preparations and stuff
Our new 2-bed Cabañita
It seems like ages ago but our beautiful Mini Cabaña is not even a full year old at the time of writing! As we had a lot of inquiries for the sea turtle season of 2025 and I wanted to be able to put together a larger team, I decided that it was time to finally have another addition to MEMANTAs sustainable infrastructure.
It took a while to find a local team that would build the cabañita for a reasonable price but I was not going to accept to pay more than I did back in 2020 for our first Cabaña which had been considerably larger than this one.
The Cabañita is quite similar to the 3-bed Cabaña but still quite different, as the walls are made of drywall and bamboo. Also the base is made of cement and I have some cool cemented stairs while there is no porch – once you step out of the door, you basically fall right into the sand 😉
The Cabañita is perfect for two friends or a couple. It is equipped with two single beds but we can put them together if people want to cuddle (nobody minds the crack in the middle, right…?)
So what do you think? Isn’t this little hut absolutely beautiful?
O sole mio: When noone is around…
Turtle off-season can get really lonely. By June each year, I am really happy that the craziness starts again soon! And you might say “but you are part of a community, right?” Yes I am! But my interaction with the local community is purely transactional and interest-based. I have come to the conclusion long ago that friendship is impossible to find for me here and I have given up.
So Osmar really is the only person I might see for days when I am not running errands and just stay on the MEMANTA property. And when even he is not around, the Internet is a real life-saver… I have my Reels talking to me whenever I feel the need to be part of society and civilization…
Before the sea turtle season sets in, the rainy season sets in. The first heavy rains and thunderstorms come around mid May and it’s kind of a relief, but it also feels like a threat because you know what is about to come: MOSQUITOES!
BUT the year 2025 was the driest year in Venecia I have ever experienced (since 2019…) and the only year where our beautiful lagoon never once got inundated. We were incredibly lucky because that meant that there were considerably less mosquitoes than in previous years while the rain was still barely enough to sustain the vegetation and hold the moisture in the sand.
If you are interested in seeing some temperature graphs, I have it all compiled for you. See temperature data from 2023, 2024 and 2025 now!
Knödel arrives!
I don’t even want to talk much about it because it still makes me sad (and a little bit angry), but Grumpy Grandpa Milo passed away on the 20th of June. He was 10 years old at that time.
Somehow, around the same time, a puppy was born into a local family that would just feel like destiny.
Because Gulasch needed a friend. Urgently. Milo had always been older and didn’t have the same playdrive as Gulasch, so their relationship had always been a bit rocky. But Gulasch learned a lot from Milo and adapted a lot of his habits.
Once he was gone, the decision was already made: We needed a playful puppy with the same energy and playdrive as Gulasch!
And oh boy was I in for a surprise… Because mid July I chose a small hungry puppy to be the new MEMANTA dog, I wanted to raise him right from the very beginning, and he was destined to become Gulasch’s little brother. But nobody prepared me for… Knödel!
If you are german you will kind of understand the word joke involving Gulasch and Knödel. If not, just research what those two words mean. They are meant to go together!
Gulasch needed about a month to get used to that little “rat” that was running around him waggling his tail, and today they are inseperable. Now Gulasch seems to be a grumpy grandpa from time to time because Knödel is challenging and annoying him so much, but most of the time they are playing together and loving each other. What a love story!
Turtle season: Month by month
So now we have come to the really interesting part. Because you are dying to find out about our turtle activity in 2025, right?
In 2025, we had 98% german power with 18 interns from Germany. Poor Emma, our coordinator for Oct-Dec, felt like an exotic race being of dutch background and talking english while unvoluntarily learning a lot of new german words just from hearing it all day long.
And yes, this was our first year having coordinators in camp, as I needed to take a step back. Not that I don’t want to stand in the hatchery each afternoon and walk on the beach each night with my interns… but I am just getting increasingly busy with project management, organisation, logistics. So I needed a right hand that would take care of the group while I was running around in the background holding everything together.
August
The 2025 season started a little bit later than usual due to a short trip to my home country. We then started in the second half of July, but I will just count this together with August.
Our first complete MEMANTA team consisted of 2 young men studying geography in the same city, who had funnily never gotten to know each other before, and 2 young women studying biology together. Nele, who was a stellar intern in 2023, returned as our first-ever coordinator and she did an awesome job!
Later that month, two more interns joined the team and Mario arrived. You will see Mario a lot more in these pictures as he stayed basically for the whole season – his internship lasted 5 months! And I somehow happen to have a lot of pictures of him, he just seems to be a photogenic guy 😉
The main tasks in July / August were getting the hatchery ready and filling up new nest spaces with fresh sand. Once the nesting season was at full speed with 2-3 nests coming in each night, we had to dig a looooot of nest spots which would fill most of the afternoons. But as is it our interns’ all-time-favourite-task (*joking*), nobody would ever complain!
We collected our first nest on the 28th of July and it just wouldn’t stop after that…
We also kept planting grass and trees on Rio’s pasture and built our brandnew turtle hospital, which is basically just a roof and five tables 😉 So it’s nothing like those sea turtle hospitals you see in developed countries. The idea was to do some good ol’ headstarting on chosen hatchlings which would be deformed, weak or somehow impaired upon their release. Under natural cirumstances they would have died already inside the nest, on the beach or during the first minutes in the water. But we give them a second chance to grow bigger and stronger, and release them after a few months in our care.
This whole hospital-thing is still in the experimential stage and I took in some valuable feedback from my interns in order to improve the whole operation and make it more beneficial for everyone involved.
Another MEMANTA First in 2025 was the Memanta Challenge and the Venecia Challenge which were added to the edutainment schedule. Basically, I send out interns in teams of two to wander around and answer a few questions and the best teams wins a small prize. Most of the interns thought it was really fun so we will keep the Challenges in our activity program for 2026 🙂
September
In September we had a very dedicated group of 4 biology students arriving while there were already 2 young women from the same course on-site. With Nele and Mario, this was the first time in MEMANTA history that we were full to the brim with 8 people at once!
For me personally, it was still a logistical challenge, but I really enjoyed having such a “big” team. Because it meant that the atmosphere was lively and joyful while we were able to do 3 patrols each night!
Very soon, it was noticeable to me that this would be a very good season with high nesting activity, which also meant that the nest prices were back to normal (in the previous year the nesting activity was quite low and the prices were too high!)
By the 15th of September we had already 73 nests inside our hatchery and “nestless” nights were very rare. We did, as usual, buy most of them during the hatchery guard shift, but we also managed to encounter a lot of turtles during patrols. Out of the 73 nests, we collected 26 ourselves.
And funnily enough, the first nests started hatching on the 15th of September! Above you can see how they look like with the red light turned on at night.
The first nests were pretty mediocre and it took us 11 nests until we surpassed a hatching success of 90 %. Then it would be just a constant up and down of success rates, which we kind of see every year, and even though we write down everything, thoroughly measure the temperature, do exhumations identifying the stages of mortality and then analyze everything at the end of the season, we still haven’t made out the factors that contribute to some nests turning out very good and other nests turning out bad.
Sure, there are Best Practices for sea turtle hatcheries that we follow, but a nest that was found right in front of MEMANTA, collected by our team and carefully relocated within 15 minutes, can have a success rate of 20 % while a nest that some unknown poacher with dirty hands brought to us wrapped in a sweaty t-shirt, that was found 3 hours prior, can have a success rate of 90 %.
Eso es loco 😀
All in all, nests collected by MEMANTA have an okay hatching success. In 2025 the average was 78 %. BUT the nests brought by our favourite “huevero” (= egg collector = nice term for poacher) Kevin had a hatching success of 82 %! Kevin does not use gloves and rides on a horse where eggs are being shaken up and down, up and down.
So the longer I work with these Olive Ridley turtles on Playa Venecia, the more they confuse me. But it’s okay, because it never gets boring and it always is a big surprise how any individual nest will turn out. I just hoped I would find the magic formula one day to have a consistent 90 % hatching success 
October
In October we had five new arrivals: One group of three biology students, but one of them was too homesick so she had to leave again after just two days, plus our second coordinator Emma, who you might still know from the previous season when she stayed for three months, plus Lina.
Lina would become our temporary social media manager and she is also responsible for the fact that MEMANTA now has a TikTok Account as she convinced me that we need it in order to reach the younger generations. So please follow us on TikTok because right now most of our audience is made up of Venecia locals who don’t even understand my english-commented videos 😀
October was for sure a busy month, with nesting and hatching events happening simultaneously, leaving us basically no time to do anything else than strictly focusing on the work with the turtles. In October we got a few more regular thunderstorms but there were no bigger rain events and BASICALLY no mosquitoes – although our interns ALWAYS get bitten somehow.
But yeah, the rainy season of 2025 was very kind to our fragile visitors while we closely kept an eye on the nest temperatures on the sunny side of our hatchery, as they would regularly surpass the lethal limit of 35°C.
By the end of October we had relocated 143 nests and released 70 of them. As it happens every year, the hatchery would get pretty full and we had trouble finding more space in between all those nests that were peacefully incubating. But somehow we always manage.
Oh, and we had another MEMANTA First this year: I was finally brave enough to rebury a nest on the beach, outside of our hatchery, to see how a semi-natural nest would turn out. It was pretty stressful to watch over that nest as nobody was allowed to even know about it. Secret nests cannot be marked or fenced, and dogs were constantly sniffing around it once – especially, once the babies were on their way up. Which is, by the way, the time depredation happens quite frequently: Once the eggs are open and the babyturtles move towards the surface, they emit a smell that attracts predators and unfortunately the most-feared predator right now is Knödel – he developed a love for turtles that couldn’t be any more wrong.
November
November was kind of a special month as we received our first group of 5. Yes, FIVE student friends travelling together, can you imagine? I was never able to convince anyone to come visit me in Nicaragua (besides my parents) and Lea just managed to do a trip with all of her friends. Wow!
From my experience, November is always a successful month in terms of sea turtle protection, if not THE best month! Why? Because there are noticeably less poachers on the beach as the fisherman start to go out again (and many of our part-time poachers are part-time fishers) → which leaves more turtles for us → which means that in November, we usually find more turtles ourself. Also, releases are just way easier and more enjoyable with less traffic on the beach.
Plus it’s the beginning of the dry season and we don’t need to fear thunderstorms during patrols anymore while enjoying beautiful starry skies. So we have tons of turtles, tons of babies, tons of stars, and November is usually the time when my beloved Green turtles start to nest as well!
HOWEVER this season we were desperately waiting for those beautiful giants to crawl out of the sea. We never had so few Green Turtle nests in our hatchery as in 2025 😦
November was also the month we did our annual visit to the MSV Nicaragua on the neighbouring beach, a fun boat ride and a very informative visit. The MSV supports us financially AND mentally with good advice on how to raise our hatching success. Thanks to the whole team!
By the end of November we had relocated 176 nests into our hatchery and released 122 of them. WOW!
December
Dry season came and with it appeared the motorized ice cream man plus the need for Rio to have some hay, as no more grass would grow on his pasture.
Suddenly, it felt terribly lonely and quiet at MEMANTA after the November group had left and no new interns had booked to come and replace them. So it was just me, Osmar, Emma and Mario. This felt really weird… but we just had to adjust to the new team dynamic and work rhythm.
There was still a lot to do in the hatchery but less and less on the beach. With nesting activity going down and prices going up, we soon stopped going on patrols and focused on our incubating nests.
Our best “huevero” Kevin, who sold 29 nests to us, received a gift basket. He would have sold us even more if we hadn’t told him sometimes “no, for today we are full”. What I really appreciated was that he is one of the few guys in this village who does not get mad at us when being turned down at the hatchery and always comes back to check again.
I hope he will stay loyal to us in the seasons to come, because ALSO remember that the overall hatching success of “his” nests was 82% which was above average!
The new year: January and February
January was a pretty interesting month as we received our first 50+ volunteer in MEMANTA history (oh gosh, so many MEMANTA Firsts in 2025!) who left a stellar performance, plus our first volunteers from France who booked quite spontaneously and stayed for just a week. They definitely came in the right week, when we had 1-3 releases scheduled each day. After Mid January it got very quiet in the hatchery and I left Doreen, our energetic 50+ volunteer, with some other tasks around the garden and the computer.
When Doreen left, the 2025 season was officially over and I started to make a huge To-Do-list for the off-season which also involved a lot of permit renewals that would cost me a lot of effort due to new rules and regulations. Fortunately I could count on the help of my parents who were here for their 3-month-vacation as they do every year. So me and my mum would run errands in the city while my dad would look over the property.
Now, bats and iguanas would gradually start to invade again and take up their space, while I have been sitting on the computer until late at night to catch up with all my tasks: Advertise the internship and look for new candidates, manage e-mails, complete the data and run some statistics, continue with our content marketing, get our website up-to-date, and so on and so forth…
All while working my freelancer job to earn just enough money to get by, continuing with the permit struggle (I still don’t have them all!), taking care of our hospital turtles, our animals and the property, going on all-day shopping trips, cooking a fresh meal each day and doing just the most necessary cleaning.
Sometimes I feel like Super Woman, and sometimes I wish I’d be it.
Let’s cross our fingers for a wonderfully successful next season! See you all next year around this time for the 2026 overview!
MEMANTA 