Live Life Like a Sea Turtle

Meet Margot, a baby green sea turtle found by fishermen in the Gulf of Mexico. After a particularly cold winter, this critter was too young to swim into deeper waters to stay warm and thereby froze in shallow water. The Audubon Aquarium of the Americas in New Orleans took her in and helped her get back on her feet, or so to speak.

I've found it increasingly difficult to fall asleep lately. I'm sure part of it is being out of school and its rhythm, while part of it is just that there's so many things to think about.

On these nights, I sometimes bring a pillow and blanket into the living room to watch the National Geographic, Discovery, or Animal Planet channel. One night in particular I decided to watch the program entitled "Oceans," which isn't too surprising.

Though I am calmed by watching sharks, eels, grumpy sea lions and orcas, I didn't expect a segment on precious little sea turtles to disturb and depress me for weeks.

I don't think anyone can deny that sea turtles are cute. They swim gracefully, and seeing them while snorkeling or diving is surreal. So when I saw the cutest little baby sea turtles hatching, I was pretty excited. Unfortunately, a few other critters were excited that the eggs were hatching, too because several different birds were waiting for a baby turtle to make its way out of the nest. Almost every baby turtle was either eaten by a bird or raccoon near the nest. Some of them were actually eaten by a terrifying salt water crocodile. These turtles are barely even alive and haven't actually become "sea" turtles yet since they haven't been given the chance to reach the sea.

Needless to say, I was upset for weeks. Every time I read about the sea turtles in the Gulf of Mexico, I'd get so sick thinking of how much they went through just to live past infancy and how much I hated birds, raccoons and crocodiles for eating innocent turtles.

Once I calmed down, however, I knew it was unhealthy to have something bother me so much. As with anything else, it only gets worse when you try not to think about it. So, I started reading up on sea turtles.

At first, it made it worse. If a sea turtle makes it through the surf for the first time, according to biologist James R. Spotila, it still has less than a 50% chance of survival. The more I read, however, the more I fell in love with sea turtles.

For instance, the sex of a sea turtle isn't determined the way humans are. Humans, as we all know, can inherit either an X or Y chromosome from their father and will become either male or female (technically speaking). Turtle gender is determined by the temperature of the egg during incubation. By this, I mean if an egg incubates at 82º F, he will become a male. If the egg incubates at 88º F, she will become a female. This even means that the position of eggs in the nest can determine what gender the egg will become, as eggs in the center are often warmer than the bordering eggs. Furthermore, if a storm passes through during the middle third of incubation, thereby lowering the temperature of the nest, eggs previously developing into females will become males. How absurd is that?

Additionally, sea turtles' brains contain magnetite, which is an iron compound. Because of this, sea turtles can sense the earth's magnetic field since the magnetite is drawn towards the North Pole. It's like having a compass built in to your brain. This is why female turtles will often find the beach they were born on to lay their eggs many years later (sea turtles often don't lay their first eggs until they are 35--sounds good to me, too).

Despite how cool sea turtles are, there are still very few of them that make it into juveniles. On top of that, beach tourism destroys turtle nesting sites and overfishing makes it difficult for many turtles to survive.

Yet, when turtles are able to live, they really do live. Sea turtles well outlive humans and can live to be over 150 years old! In fact, the Galapagos turtle named Harriet that Darwin brought back on the 1835 Beagle voyage lived to be 176 and only recently died in 2006. Take a moment to think about that. This turtle is older than Darwin's Origin of Species--a book that single handedly altered our understanding of how things change over time. But that ridiculous turtle lived through all of it. The oldest living turtle on record was a 250 year old from the Kolkata Zoo in India. Imagine if we were able to live that long--we would be able to see so much more of the world and do so much more with our lives. Turtles are creatures that may have to truly fight in order to live, but still they live more fully than humans do. Our average lifespan is only around 72 years, yet we spend a large part of it not aware of how lucky we are to be alive.

What can I take away from this besides cool turtle facts? For one, it's hard caring about the world. The more you read and learn, the more you feel incapable of helping all the things that are wrong. However, if we ignore the world and try not to think about it, we only feel worse. By choosing to educate ourselves and face the things that make us uncomfortable, the stronger we are in facing problems and the more beauty we'll stumble upon. Secondly, since sea turtles have to fight a lot harder than we do in order to live, we might as well live life more fully.

Want to read more about these bad asses? I got most of my information in James R. Spotila's book here