Our new MEMANTA sign!
Off season

Let the fun begin!

Slowly MEMANTA is turning into what we’ve imagined it to be over all these years. With more and more interns coming from overseas, the occasional tourist stopping by and exciting projects being realized, we are growing and improving every single month.
Here’s all the updates you need to know!

THE SEA TURTLE SEASON CAME TO AN END

Even though a new year had begun, we still had quite a few nests in the hatchery – both from Olive Ridleys and Green Turtles. Fortunately there were some helping hands around, first the Berg family and then Lennard, a brave soul from northern Germany who decided to do a 3-month internship in the field of geography! Even though Lennard’s focus wasn’t sea turtles, he got trained in nest exhumations and releases. We didn’t go on any more night patrols, but that didn’t stop him from witnessing one legendary nesting event right in front of our property! He saw the turtle dragging herself out of the water, totally unexpected, in the middle of the day, when he was having his midday beach break. What a lucky guy! He immediately called us and we collected the eggs together – it was the last nest of the 2021/2022 season!

Continue reading “Let the fun begin!”
Nearly full...
Turtle season

Magical moments on the beach

Hey… it’s been quite some time. But the good news is: It’s not that there hasn’t been anything to tell. I haven’t written for so long because I just couldn’t find the time and tranquility as we’ve been so overwhelmed by this years’ turtle season. Here are all the details:

The official MEMANTA hatchery is up

After two years working with a provisional hatchery that we had built close to our house, about 200 metres away from the beachfront, the time had finally come: We built a permanent, fully-closed hatchery closer to the beach that holds space for around 50 nests at a time. The hatchery is fully secured against human intruders and all kinds of animals. Also, it is shaded in order to secure favourable temperatures and avoid a female-biased sex ratio (climate change and stuff…).

Unfortunately, the hatchery soon resulted too small. Especially in late September, our hatchery became super crowded as the older nests hadn’t hatched yet while more and more were coming in! Also, we had started putting some nests in the ground, as hatcheries “usually” do it. The thing is that in this case, you have to space out the nests more (the rule of thumb says 1m) so that bacteria etc. from one nest can’t spread to the others. With bag hatcheries, you don’t have that issue and can put the bags real close to each other.

We found that the hatching success is roughly the same for both methods, but bag hatcheries do create more waste and the nests take longer to hatch as they cool down quite a bit during the night. Next season, we would like to keep working with both methods – some nests we’ll put in our iconic red bags and some we’ll put in the ground.
Needless to say… we’ll then have to double the size of our hatchery!

Continue reading “Magical moments on the beach”