Off season, Turtle season

Getting Bigger and Busier – 2025 Overview

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.

Continue reading “Getting Bigger and Busier – 2025 Overview”
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”