Picture of Leatherback turtle on the way back to the sea after laying eggs on the beach (Galibi, Surinam)

Leatherback on the way back to the sea

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When a big dark shadow moved ashore and climbed up the beach, we became very emotional and did not take our eyes off this huge leatherback turtle until it had laid all its eggs.
Now, we could see the process from the beginning: moving around sand, and finally deciding to make a hole, and doing a big effort with her hind fins to dig a hole deep enough to hide her around 100 eggs. Digging took around half an hour, the hole being pretty deep (basically as deep as her fins were long). She did not wait to start getting rid of her eggs, and a few minutes later the hols was almost filled up by larger than ping-pong balls sized eggs - some dented, some perfectly round. The leatherback covered the eggs with sand, and since we were being bitten severely by clouds of mosquitoes, we left. But the impression lasted: statistically, only one out of 1000 eggs actually grows to be an adult leatherback - all that work for a 10% chance that there would be one survivor, which the mother anyway would never know. On our way back to Galibi, we were still in awe at what we had seen - such a pure, ingenious and instinctive ritual.
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