For the Turtles, Not the Tan

A veterinarian I met last month on this pristine Pacific Coast beach told me you should never trust an animal that doesn’t have shoulders.

That includes most reptiles, but not the leatherback sea turtle, a frequent visitor to these Central American sands. The leatherback has shoulders, isn’t known to attack and routinely accomplishes extraordinary feats, like swimming 3,700 miles in a year, diving 4,500 feet and heaving its half-ton, bathtub-size body out of the sea at night to lay eggs on the beach. The females have been doing this for the last 120 million years, but the worldwide leatherback population has declined by two-thirds since 1980. If the trend continues, they will be as extinct as their reptilian kin the dinosaur by 2005.

I learned all this as a volunteer in December with the Earthwatch Institute sea turtle project, which helped establish a national park dedicated to leatherbacks at Playa Grande, located in northwestern Costa Rica and considered to be one of the world’s most important remaining nesting sites (others are as far afield as South America’s French Guiana and Africa’s Ivory Coast). About 200 females come ashore here to lay eggs from October to March, nesting an average of seven times a season, depositing as many as six dozen eggs in the sand each time. The project, founded in 1990 by two U.S. biologists, also has helped discourage commercial development and egg poaching at Playa Grande, and the kind of net fishing that is a major, if accidental, cause of sea turtle mortality. More important, it has been amassing long-range data, a tedious but critical task for leatherback survival.

My 10-day stint as an Earthwatch volunteer taught me that even someone as disinclined to environmental activism and as unscientific as I can make a difference in the effort to stop the extinction of this miraculous creature. I could have come to Costa Rica to swill margaritas by the beach, but this was better than leaving with a tan and a straw hat.

Project co-founder Frank Paladino, of Indiana-Purdue University in Ft. Wayne, says the Playa Grande leatherback research costs about $65,000 a year and could not be maintained without the Earthwatch Institute, a nonprofit organization based in Watertown, Mass. Earthwatch started in 1971 and uses the fees charged to “volunteers” to subsidize research projects all over the world. This year, 3,800 Earthwatch volunteers will spend their vacations by joining 140 studies on subjects ranging from contamination in Siberia’s Lake Baikal to Anglo-Zulu War sites on the South African veldt to mountain lions in Idaho.

Volunteers are usually attracted to projects involving archeological sites and “charismatic mega-vertebrates,” like cheetahs, whales and orangutans, says Blue Magruder, Earthwatch’s public affairs director. A turtle’s charisma is subtler, part of the reason I chose the leatherback trip, which costs $1,695 (excluding transportation). Admittedly, though, the study site, on a 2.5-mile beach just north of the shaggy surfer’s haven of Tamarindo, also held the promise of a tan.

After registering for the trip I received a briefing booklet from Earthwatch explaining the purpose of the leatherback project: to identify and protect the nesting females at Playa Grande and develop conservation strategies. The briefing also told me what to pack (including insect repellent, extra sneakers and at least two bathing suits) and provided advice on how to reach Playa Grande by bus or plane from the Costa Rican capital of San Jose.

Above all, the briefing made it clear that volunteering isn’t for the fainthearted. It discussed the rigors of working at Playa Grande, where we would walk the beach from about 8 p.m. to 3 a.m. every night, monitoring the nesting turtles. (Like the rest of the volunteers, I had to get my doctor to sign a form that vouched for my ability to handle the physical challenges.)

Nor could the food or our accommodations--dormitory-style condo units with air-conditioning and shared baths--be described as deluxe. And because the region is home to cockroaches, ants, crocodiles, iguanas and boa constrictors, those with phobias about insects and snakes were advised to stay home.

All of this gave me pause but wasn’t enough to deter me when weighed against knowing that, by volunteering with the sea turtle project, I’d get a chance to see these rare and wonderful creatures up close.

I met the other members of my team shortly after reaching the Tamarindo airport, a misnomer for the landing strip in the middle of a cow pasture in the dry savanna east of the coast. There were three besides me: Rita, a New York medical technician in her late 20s who put us all to shame by jogging every morning in the stultifying heat; Nicole from the Bay Area, also in her late 20s and the spearhead for most of our adventures; and 62-year-old Barbara from Colorado, who had been on two Earthwatch expeditions, one of them an archeological dig in the Australian outback.

We joined a staff of eight, including turtle veterinarian Dr. Robert George and Purdue graduate student Susanna Clusella Trulles, the project manager. By week’s end, the staff was half the size it was when we started. George, whom we called Dr. Bob, his wife, Sharon, and another grad student returned to the States for the holidays, and a young Costa Rican worker went home to care for a sick parent. Staff attrition and the absence of directors Paladino and James Spotila of Drexel University in Philadelphia (not due at Playa Grande until January) put a strain on the project, making it difficult for those who remained to spend much time educating volunteers.

But our work on the beach, where we were always accompanied by a staff member, wasn’t complicated, and the sight of our first turtle (by red-filtered flashlight, because the creatures seem to be daunted by white lights) was pure magic. To an untrained eye, it’s a big black blur in the shallows that starts to take shape as it galumphs up the beach on powerful front fins ill suited to terrestrial locomotion. You can hear it groan and, if the moon is shining, you can see its greenish-brown carapace, or shell, generally more than 5 feet long, and study how it digs its nest chamber with surprisingly agile rear fins. When the chamber is finished, the leatherback goes into a trance as she lays her dozens of elastic, golf ball-sized eggs (35% to 75% of which hatch, though only one or two hatchlings of every thousand survive to adulthood). While the egg clutch accumulates, the nesting mother wouldn’t notice a passing train, and that gives researchers a chance to log the turtle in (using a hand-held scanning device to see whether it has been tagged in previous years), put numbered pit tags in the shoulders of new turtles and make sure they actually lay eggs. It also gives the 100 or so tourists who routinely visit the beach with local guides and Costa Rican government beach monitors the opportunity to see a leatherback close up.

The presence of the crowd during the mother’s labor seems a little irreverent, and groups have been known to cause emerging turtles to turn back to the sea. There are generally fewer than 100 tourists, and they stay for only the first few nestings of the night. The money they pay the guides, many of them poachers before the advent of the national park and organized tourism, has discouraged the poaching of eggs, which are coveted as male potency enhancers. After working with a few entranced mother turtles, I understand how oblivious they are while laying their eggs. So you can save your sympathy for smarter creatures. As dear and valiant as these leatherbacks are, their brains weigh just a quarter of an ounce.

On long, steamy-hot, buggy nights that passed with the same feeling of unreality as the nights I worked as a waitress on the graveyard shift in college, Nicole, Rita, Barbara and I became adept at filling out log sheets with the information staff members gleaned by scanning and measuring the turtles.

We also checked the hatchery, a fenced part of the beach where eggs laid too close to the surf were moved, to see whether any baby turtles had dug their way up to the surface. Usually we found 100 or so clambering to be released from the wire canopies that restrained them. Everybody loved carrying the creatures to the water’s edge, where the turtles stopped briefly to get their bearings, then marched into the sea.

Friendships developed during those long nights, and Mario, a young staff biologist from Mexico, told ghost stories. Moreover, though we volunteers could take a night off whenever we wanted, we seldom did because we could tell we were needed, not for our expertise but for the company we provided, which helped keep staff members awake and alert.

I tended to patrol with Dr. Bob, which was a boon because he was full of interesting facts about turtles and biologists, who have been known to administer ultrasound tests to breeding leatherbacks and attach magnets to hatchlings’ heads to see how that affects their navigation. Our group leader, longhaired, diminutive Susanna, spent months alone on a remote beach north of Playa Grande, working with olive ridley turtles, and there were stories aplenty told by all the old turtle hands about encounters with crocodiles and the sinking of overloaded scientific equipment boats. “You have to be a little off to dedicate your life to turtles,” Dr. Bob said one night when it rained and no leatherbacks emerged. It was about 2 a.m., and four of us were sitting on a log, bored and sodden. But he cheered us up by recalling that what we were doing at Playa Grande had global implications.

Dr. Bob was there at the high point of my trip, helping a spastic leatherback dig her nest; several nights in a row she had emerged to lay eggs, but aborted. When it looked as if she was going to give up again, he helped to stimulate her cervix, a trick sometimes used on cows, to get the desperate and beleaguered mother to lay her eggs. That night, on our stretch of the beach (divided into three sections, each about three-quarters of a mile long), we logged seven turtles, a total topped several days later when Mario and I had 12.

By habit, I’m an early riser. But in the volunteers’ two-story condo about a half-mile east of the beach, I wore earplugs and an eyeshade and tried to sleep in. We kept the air-conditioning cranking, which almost drowned out the construction noise on the other side of the wall that began each day about 6:30 a.m. I got used to being filthy, showering with armies of ants and sleeping in a room with three other women where laundry was heaped everywhere.

In the mornings, I eventually crawled out of bed and walked a half-mile down a rutted dirt road to Kike’s (pronounced kee-kays), the thatch-roofed restaurant and pool hall where the Earthwatch team breakfasted on banana pancakes, beans and rice or scrambled eggs. If you got up too late for a morning meal, you could order a hamburger. At Kike’s, I saw a boa constrictor eating an iguana on a nearby rock ledge and learned the Hawaiian thumb-and-pinky-finger “hang loose” wave from a French surfer with a blond ponytail.

Our days were mostly free and industrious, with Nicole at the helm. We walked three miles to Tamarindo (a town whose charms can be exhausted in 15 minutes), canoed the stagnant waters of the estuary that separates Tamarindo from Playa Grande in search of howler monkeys and crocodiles and went horseback riding to an overlook that provides sweeping views of Playa Grande and its northern neighbor, Playa Ventanas. We also visited the Turtle Museum in Playa Grande, with displays on the leatherback’s life cycle, and rode in the project’s rattletrap van to the city of Liberia (about 50 miles east of the coast), where we said goodbye to Dr. Bob and did some Christmas shopping.

But we always made it back to Playa Grande for dinner with the group at Hotel Las Tortugas (the turtles), where there’s a pool, hammocks and a restaurant, serving more hamburgers, and beans and rice.

Would you call this a vacation? That depends. Walking the beach was more grueling than I expected, and the living conditions made the Best Western hotel in San Jose, where I overnighted on my way home, look grand. But it isn’t every day you get to see leatherback turtles hoist themselves back into the ocean after laying eggs. Retreating, they leave a wide, unmistakable trail in the sand. And they definitely have shoulders.

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GUIDEBOOK

Keeping Tabs on the Turtles

Getting there: American, Continental, Lacsa and United fly direct from L.A. to San Jose, Costa Rica. The lowest round-trip fare is $586.

To get from San Jose to Tamarindo, fly on SANSA, telephone 011-506-221-9414, Internet https://www.grupotaca.com/ing/sansa.html, or Travel- Air, tel. (800) 948-3770 or 011-506-220-3054. Round-trip tickets cost about $150.

The Best Western hotel in downtown San Jose, tel. 011- 506-255-4766, fax 011-506- 255-4613, can also arrange bus transportation to Tamarindo.

Where to stay: If you’re not joining the Earthwatch project at Playa Grande but want to stay on the beach, try Hotel Las Tortugas, tel./fax 011-506-653- 0458, which has 11 air-conditioned rooms for $85 a night, a pool and restaurant. For those laying over in San Jose before heading on to Tamarindo, a good choice is the Best Western Irazu, tel. (800) 272-6654 or 011-506-232-4811, fax 011-506-232-4549, Internet https://www.bestwestern.com/TravelWeb/ bw/common/reserve.html; doubles $70 to $85.

For more information: Contact the Earthwatch Institute, 680 Mt. Auburn St., Box 9104, Watertown, MA 02471, tel. (800) 776-0188 or (617) 926-8200, fax (617) 926-8532, Internet https://www.earthwatch.org. There is also a California office at 3130 Alpine Road, Suite 200-58, Portola Valley, CA 94028, tel. (650) 851-5303. Membership in the organization costs $35, and trip fees are tax deductible.

The Playa Grande Leatherback Sea Turtle Project takes volunteers for 10 teams (consisting of no more than eight people each) from October to February. The remaining teams for this season are scheduled for Jan. 15 and 25 and Feb. 4.

For general information on the country, contact the Consulate General of Costa Rica, 1605 W. Olympic Blvd., Suite 400, Los Angeles, CA 90015; tel. (800) 343-6332 or (213) 380- 7915, fax (213) 380-5639, Internet https://www.costarica.tourism.co.cr.