Turtle season

Happy lonely times

Timing couldn’t have been more unfortunate when a global crisis halted international travel for many months to come, just about when we were opening our doors.

But I’m not going to cry to you about the severe state we’re all in – I’m here to tell you all the good news that happened this year. Because despite the pandemic, things were going great for us at MEMANTA as we simply kept doing what we love the most.

We collaborated with more people and protected more nests:

This year we collaborated with four young men from the community who would fill our hatchery with nests that weren’t safe on the beach. Those guys are good friends with Melvin and work regularly for us, so there’s a lot of trust involved. They would come up to our house, wake us up in the middle of the night and help to rebury the eggs. However, we also received some nests from random people from the community, which made us especially happy because it shows that there are quite a few guys out there who want to support us.

All in all, we were able to relocate 70 nests during the 2020/2021 season! That’s a total of 7040 eggs – mostly from the Olive Ridley turtle, but also from the Eastern Pacific Hawksbill turtle. It’s a huge increase from last year with only 22 nests.

Continue reading “Happy lonely times”
Preparation & Construction

Ain’t no time to take a break

We’ve got some eventful months behind us!

  • We released the last hatchlings into the sea and got a pretty good success rate
  • We’ve had our first visitors testing the camping area and leaving mesmerized
  • We started the construction of our volunteer cabin
  • We discovered some new destinations for future adventure trips
  • I received my permanent residency for Nicaragua

So here are all the details:

 

MEMANTAs first hatchery season is over

I think we can be very proud of our 84% hatching success, given that anything above 70% is considered good for a hatchery and anything above 90% is rarely seen (but of course not impossible).
Even under natural conditions, IF the nests remain totally undisturbed by humans or predators, the success rates can result quite low – this can be due to varying factors like
the health of the mother turtle, unfavourable temperatures, weather extremes, inundation and erosion etc.
Given the fact that all nests on our beach get poached, it is totally necessary to transfer them into an enclosed hatchery. And even when it seems that we failed sometimes – our first nest had only a 50% success rate and another one had a very high hatchling mortality – we can be happy about every single turtle that made its way to the sea.
I don’t think I exaggerate if I say:
Playa Venecia has seen its first baby turtles in decades!

Continue reading “Ain’t no time to take a break”