Tourists Crowded Nesting Sea Turtles at Ostional, Costa Rica, in 2015

On the weekend of 5 September 2015, hundreds of visitors poured onto Ostional beach on Costa Rica's Pacific coast during a mass nesting of olive ridley sea turtles. With only two park rangers and three police officers on duty, the crowd surrounded the animals, touched them, stood on nests and, in some cases, placed children on the turtles' backs for photos. Many females turned back to the sea without laying their eggs. The images spread worldwide and pushed the community and the authorities to tighten the rules for visitors.

Here is what happened, why Ostional matters so much to sea turtles, and how to watch a nesting without harming it.

What happened at Ostional in September 2015

The incident was first made public by SITRAMINAE, the Environment Ministry workers' union, on its Facebook page, and photos circulated through pages such as Geografía de Costa Rica. Refuge administrator Carlos Hernández told the newspaper La Nación that he had never seen so many people on the beach, according to the Tico Times.

Visitors are supposed to enter the refuge only with a licensed guide, but many walked in through unofficial paths from neighbouring properties. Several factors came together that weekend: the nesting fell on a Saturday and Sunday, tour companies had stepped up trips for the peak season, and an unusually dry spell meant the rivers that often flood the road in September did not block access.

Photos taken that weekend show the beach at Ostional crowded with people during the arribada. Nesting females need quiet, dark sand to dig a chamber and lay around a hundred eggs, and a ring of onlookers can be enough to make them abandon the attempt and return to the water.

Why Ostional is so important

Ostional, in the canton of Santa Cruz in Guanacaste, is one of the world's most important nesting sites for the olive ridley, the second-smallest sea turtle. Adults have shells about 60 centimetres long and rarely weigh more than 50 kilograms. The species is listed as Vulnerable by the IUCN.

Olive ridleys are famous for the arribada, Spanish for "arrival": thousands of females come ashore together over a few nights to nest on the same stretch of sand. Ostional sees arribadas almost every month, usually around the new moon, along roughly seven kilometres of beach, with September and October the busiest months. Only a handful of beaches host these events, among them Nancite in Costa Rica, La Flor and Chacocente in Nicaragua, Escobilla in Mexico and Gahirmatha in India.

During the peak months the density of turtles is so high that new arrivals often dig up eggs laid by earlier ones. That natural loss is part of the reason the local egg harvest described below is allowed at all.

A community that lives with the turtles

Ostional is unusual because egg collection there is legal. After about ten years of scientific study, Costa Rica approved a regulated harvest in 1987, run by the Ostional Integral Development Association (ADIO). Residents may collect only eggs laid in the first 72 hours of an arribada, when many would otherwise be destroyed by later nesters. According to the Tico Times, the community takes around 4.5 million eggs a year, less than one percent of those laid. In return, locals clean the beach, patrol nests and guide visitors.

That arrangement is why the 2015 crowd caused such anger in the village: the people who depend on the turtles were watching outsiders put the nesting at risk.

Images like this one show how close visitors came to the turtles. Touching a nesting female, blocking her path or shining lights at her can interrupt nesting, and standing on the sand above a nest compacts it and can crush the eggs beneath.

A wider problem across Costa Rica

Turtle workers in Costa Rica say Ostional was an extreme case of a common problem. Jonathon Miller-Weisberger, a marine conservationist linked to the Guaria de Osa eco-lodge on the Osa Peninsula, argued at the time that both visitors and coastal communities need to change how they behave around turtles as numbers fall. His group 4Biodiversity.org runs education work with local young people and protects active nests.

Two more photos from the same weekend show tourists among the turtles at the water's edge. Olive ridley eggs incubate in the warm sand for roughly 45 to 51 days, so damage done to nests on one weekend is only fully visible weeks later, when far fewer hatchlings emerge.

The killing of Jairo Mora

Protecting turtles in Costa Rica can be dangerous. On the night of 30 May 2013, the 26-year-old conservationist Jairo Mora Sandoval was kidnapped and murdered while patrolling Moín beach near Limón, on the Caribbean coast, to protect leatherback nests from egg poachers. Seven men were acquitted in a first trial after judges ruled that key evidence had been mishandled. The prosecution appealed and won a retrial, and in 2016 four of the men were convicted of his murder and sentenced to the maximum terms; under Costa Rican law each will serve up to 50 years.

These last images, also shared by Geografía de Costa Rica, capture the scale of the crowd. They became a symbol in Costa Rican media of what happens when a wildlife spectacle is promoted without enough staff to protect it.

What changed after the incident

Within days, ADIO, community leaders, the Environment Ministry's conservation system (SINAC) and police met to plan for the next arribada. The Tico Times reported the new measures later that month:

Four of the six beach access points were closed, and the remaining two were watched by SINAC staff and police.
Traffic police set up checkpoints on the road to Ostional, and tourist police patrolled the surrounding area.
Visitors could enter only with one of about 30 guides authorised by ADIO, in groups of no more than ten, for viewings of up to 30 minutes instead of an hour.
Property owners faced fines for letting tourists cross their land to reach the beach.

How to watch a turtle nesting responsibly

Seeing an arribada is a remarkable experience, and well-managed tourism supports the people who protect the turtles. If you go:

Book a licensed local guide and enter only through official access points.
Keep your distance and stay behind the turtle, out of her line of sight.
Never touch, ride or lift a turtle, and never put a child on one.
Avoid flash photography and white lights; follow your guide on red-light torches.
Watch where you step, since nests are hidden under the sand.
Do not buy turtle eggs or products from unofficial sellers.

The crowd of 2015 was not a sign that people no longer care about nature; many of those visitors had travelled a long way because they did care. What was missing was guidance and enough rangers to provide it. Ostional's response shows that clear limits, local guides and enforcement can let people see the arribada while giving the turtles the space they need.

Sources: Tico Times: Crowd of tourists in Costa Rica prevents sea turtles from nesting; Tico Times: New arribada tests efforts to control tourists; Tico Times: Playa Ostional, a community that lives for sea turtles; Wikipedia: Olive ridley sea turtle; Mongabay: Four get maximum sentence for murder of Costa Rican sea turtle conservationist; Wikipedia: Jairo Mora Sandoval. Photos courtesy of Geografía de Costa Rica; original report by Vic Bishop for Waking Times.

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COMMENTS

BLOGGER: 4

Winning BigOctober 5, 2015 at 12:06 PM
Self-centered, all about me - uggh people. Sometimes I am embarrassed to be human!
FATMAOctober 22, 2015 at 5:22 AM
Such sad pictures... Instead of protecting the intimacy of the moment, people just want show off. not mentioning the risk of braking the eggs...
What if hundreds of women giving birth where invaded by some other people parading in between and taking pictures...
KarlNovember 9, 2015 at 12:42 AM
Idiots is the exact word for these people ...