Record nesting of Olive Ridley turtles off the Rushikulya coast

After a record 4.92 lakh Olive Ridley turtles crawled off the Rushikulya coast in Odisha, scientists have tagged over 6,000 turtles to gather more information about their breeding behavior and migration.

“6 Days” aribada On the Rushikulya coast, we have recorded 4.92 lakh nests and are still counting. It is the tallest nest which has broken all the records of the coast,” said Amalan Nayak, Divisional Forest Officer, Berhampur.

Scientists from the Zoological Survey of India (ZSI) have tagged more than one percent of turtles that visit the beach during the nesting period. “The more turtles we tag, the more information we have about breeding behavior and re-migration intervals,” said ZSI scientist Basudev Tripathi. He said the chances of tag returns were very low and last year, when 1,200 tortoises were tagged, there were only four tag returns.

ministry statement

On 30 March, the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEFCC) took note of both the spectacular nesting and tagging of turtles at Rushikulya Rookery. “ZSI team monitoring nest population, counting aribada All night since 26 March 2022… around 1,200 turtles were tagged every night, in the last three nights, more than 4,000 female turtles have been tagged by #ZSI,” MoEFCC had said in a series of tweets. arabada is a Spanish word meaning “arrival from the sea” and refers to the collective nesting behavior displayed by Kemp’s Ridley and Olive Ridley sea turtles.

ZSI scientists describe how decades of tagging yielded interesting information about Olive Ridley turtles.

travel to sri lanka

“Before tagging the turtles, we had information that it was a migratory species. Tagging now suggests that Olive Ridley turtles can travel as far as Sri Lanka. Also, we came to know that the migratory tortoise is present throughout the Bay of Bengal and even off the coast of Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu,” Dr Tripathi said.

There are two mass nesting sites for Olive Ridley turtles in Odisha – the Gahirmatha Marine Sanctuary and the Rushikulya Coast – and the turtle’s tag returns have pointed to “inter-rookery movement” of these turtles.

“It was previously believed that there are two distinct groups of Olive Ridley populations, one in Gahirmatha and the other in Rushikulya, and during migration, turtles return to the same coast. But the tag return has confirmed that a turtle nesting in Gahirmatha may later return to Rushikulya and vice versa,” said the scientist. Commenting on the conservation implications of the Inter-Rookery movement, Dhriti Banerjee, Director of the ZSI, stressed on “equal protection for both the nesting sites at Gahirmatha and Rushikulya”.

Olive Ridley turtles are protected as a Schedule I species under the Wildlife (Protection) Act, 1972 and classified as Vulnerable as per the IUCN Red List.