Last weekend I travel to a local beach near my hometown in Mexico. The beach is called Ixtapa.
It started as a regular stay and when I was just laying under the sun in the sand, the waves discovered some white round things buried in the sand.
They were turtle eggs that had been laid the night before.
Even though it’s not actual hatching season, some turtles arrive earlier. Anyway, the thing is that most people just passed by saw them and even lift them and threw them away, some kids started to bury them away but the sea continued to unvailed them, I was nervous and I knew I needed to to something, specially after seeing some random kid approaching the nest to step on them (WTF). I was actually shocked and it took me a minute to realize that those eggs were were in danger, danger of ignorance of most tourist. I started looking for information on what to do online, but came to the conclusion that I’m no turtle expert and to be honest by looking on the internet wouldn’t help much cause I didn’t know what kind of turtle or any thing about the situation.
Finally I started looking for some locals (informal sellers and staff of the hotel) and for my surprised, the second I told them they knew exactly what to do, they called a special team they have form in every hotel in the area, to secure the eggs and called a special biology office in that location to come get them. They couldn’t save them all because they had been exposed to ingnorant people but most of them were safe and they told me it was the best thing to call them.
The cool thing is that while they were securing the are, they took the time to establish a conversation with some tourist around the nest to explain why is important to take care of the environment, of this species and not try to do things we are not prepared for.
Most of the times ignorance is what puts our environment in danger.
There are a lot of local efforts to maintain their source of income in balance and when we, city slickers, visit we should respect their environment, and efforts to keep it safe.
