Although green turtles roam temperate and tropical oceans around the world, the Caribbean (and neighboring islands such as Bermuda), was once a special stronghold: explorers claimed the sea was so thick with turtles that European sailing ships could navigate<\/a> by the animals\u2019 plosive exhalations. After the English aristocracy developed a taste for turtle soup in the 19th century, however, populations of green turtles\u2014so named for the hue of their fat\u2014nosedived. By 1878, soup manufacturers were shipping more than 15,000 live turtles<\/a> across the Atlantic each year to be stuffed into cans.<\/p>\n Leaders of the Caribbean Conservation Corporation sit in their modest station at Tortuguero. Three of the men in the photo (Joshua Powers facing the camera, Ben Phipps standing, and Archie Carr wearing a hat) were the central figures in the formation of the organization. Photo courtesy of conserveturtles.org<\/p><\/div>\n As the appetite for turtle meat spread to the United States, the pig-sized reptiles began vanishing from subtropical and tropical Atlantic beaches\u2014including Bermuda\u2019s. The lush seagrass pastures off the country\u2019s coast remain important feeding grounds for juvenile green turtles, herbivores that saw off vegetation with their serrated, toothless jaws. But while subadults from as far as the Mediterranean partake in Bermuda\u2019s submarine buffet, the island hasn\u2019t hosted a nesting population since the 1930s. \u201cWe\u2019d all been hoping that someday this would happen again,\u201d Tacklin says. \u201cBut none of us expected it at all.\u201d<\/p>\n Burchall\u2019s discovery thrilled the entire country, yet it baffled scientists\u2014where had the cryptic hatchling come from? To many, the turtle\u2019s presence raised a compelling question: had a seemingly futile conservation effort, abandoned amidst tragedy almost 40 years ago, actually succeeded?<\/p>\n Although Bermuda hasn\u2019t had nesting green turtles for decades, it wasn\u2019t for lack of trying. And trying. The nation\u2019s turtle recovery efforts date at least to 1963, when scientist David Wingate, Bermuda\u2019s first conservation officer, launched an audacious scheme to restore a crescent of rock and jungle called Nonsuch Island.<\/p>\n Nonsuch, about the size of nine city blocks, lies in the northeastern corner of the Bermuda archipelago. Wingate, who\u2019d studied zoology at Cornell University in New York State before returning to his native Bermuda, hoped to transform the island into a living museum\u2014a re-creation of what the outpost probably looked like before British settlers devoured seabirds, introduced rats, and generally bollixed up the ecosystem. Over the decades, Wingate vanquished invasive rodents, planted native vegetation, and reintroduced species<\/a>, from the yellow-crowned night heron to a resplendent snail called the West Indian top shell.<\/p>\n But for Wingate and his fellow Bermudians, the Nonsuch Island Living Museum remained incomplete without one of its most charismatic ex-residents: the green sea turtle.<\/p>\n Fortunately, Wingate was not the only biologist then trying to bring back vanished marine reptiles. In 1959, another legendary scientist, Archie Carr, had begun Operation Green Turtle, his own ambitious restoration project for the Caribbean Conservation Corporation (now known as Sea Turtle Conservancy). Under the plan\u2019s auspices, Carr collected 130,000 green hatchlings at Tortuguero, a turtle-rich stretch of Costa Rican shoreline, over 10 years, and relocated the younglings to Barbados, Honduras, Belize, Puerto Rico, and other coasts that had been ransacked for their turtles. The US Navy assisted Carr\u2019s effort, donating several amphibious planes to airlift the animals. With any luck, Carr thought, the turtles would imprint on their new homes and, years hence, return to their release sites to lay eggs.<\/p>\n Several years into the project, by fortuitous coincidence, Wingate wrote Carr a letter soliciting suggestions for repatriating turtles to his living museum. When Carr described Operation Green Turtle to his Bermudian colleague, Wingate realized he\u2019d found the solution to repopulating Nonsuch Island\u2019s shores. By that point, Carr had come to believe that hatchlings were too old to imprint upon unfamiliar beaches, so he decided to relocate eggs instead of newborns. The two scientists traveled repeatedly to Tortuguero, crouching behind mama turtles and gingerly transferring clutches of freshly laid spheres into styrofoam boxes. After the navy requisitioned its military airplanes for the Vietnam War in 1968, collecting trips became perilous. On one occasion, Wingate\u2019s tiny chartered plane was so crammed with eggs that his wife, Anita, perched on his lap. \u201cI remember the pilot doing the sign of the cross as he set off down the grass runway with the rainforest looming ahead of us,\u201d Wingate recalls.<\/p>\n A US Navy plane waits in Tortuguero River next to the Caribbean Conservation Corporation hatchery station for a load of green turtles. Photo courtesy of conserveturtles.org<\/p><\/div>\n Wingate survived that journey, and many more. He spent years digging nests and reburying the eggs on Nonsuch Island, as well as on a private strip of beach owned by Henry Clay Frick II, the philanthropic grandson of the famed industrialist of the same name. Carr, the Wingates, and Frick\u2019s daughter, Jane, would camp on the beach for weeks, awaiting each hatch. When the newborns emerged, one of the Wingates\u2019 two young daughters sometimes swam out to sea alongside the babies, defending them from fish and gulls. Altogether, the project produced over 16,000 hatchlings. It was a labor of reptilian love.<\/p>\n But tragedy interrupted Wingate\u2019s efforts. In 1973, Anita died in a house fire\u2014\u201cshattering my life,\u201d as Wingate puts it. The biologist, stricken with grief, was tasked with raising his daughters alone. The same year, the government of Costa Rica revoked his permit to collect eggs, and the relocations ceased. Calamity struck several years later, when Jane Frick committed suicide. By the time Carr died in 1987, not a single plundered beach had regained its green turtles. And so Operation Green Turtle ended, another doomed conservation scheme on a planet gouged by extinction, another scar on a wounded world.<\/p>\n On the morning of Frank Burchall\u2019s find, David Wingate, now 80 years old, was birdwatching near St. George\u2019s, a 10-minute drive from where the hatchling had crossed Barry Road. A local conservationist alerted him to the discovery at around 10:00 a.m., sending Wingate racing for Buildings Bay beach, where Ryan Tacklin and other aquarium staff had rushed to look for additional hatchlings. Slow-motion chaos greeted the retired scientist: more newborns had indeed emerged the previous night, but the beckoning lights of civilization had lured them astray. Around a dozen had taken shelter in the shade of nearby shrubs. A gaggle of residents, drawn by the commotion, scoured the vegetation for wayward turtles.<\/p>\n \u201cPeople were crawling around on their knees in the weeds,\u201d remembers Anne Meylan, a Florida-based sea turtle biologist who happened to be conducting research in Bermuda that week. \u201cIt elicited such a sense of wonder.\u201d The community was entranced.<\/p>\n The scientists released the hatchlings into the ocean, though three didn\u2019t survive the ordeal. Tacklin and others camped on the beach that night and guided two more stragglers to the sea; the local electric company agreed to switch off nearby streetlights. Three days later, aquarists knelt in the sand and, with their hands, dug out the waist-deep nest chamber. At the cavity\u2019s bottom they found two more living hatchlings, four infertile eggs, and the remains of 86 hatched eggs. Altogether, nearly 100 baby greens had vanished into the sea.<\/p>\n Hatchlings are released in Antigua. Photo courtesy of conserveturtles.org<\/p><\/div>\n The speculation began immediately: could these hatchlings be the offspring of a long-lost Operation Green Turtle transplant? Nearly four decades had passed since Wingate relocated his last clutch of turtle eggs. While most female green turtles reach sexual maturity between 25 and 35 years old, a 40-year-old first-timer wasn\u2019t out of the question.<\/p>\n Meylan, however, was skeptical. She suspected the mysterious mother had come from Florida, where conservation efforts<\/a>, especially the protection of prime nesting beaches, had recently produced a shelled eruption. In 2015, green turtles dug 37,341 nests in the Sunshine State\u2014the most since record-keeping began. Perhaps a disoriented turtle from the vast Floridian armada had meandered 1,000 kilometers off course. Meylan collected the three dead hatchlings, cut slivers of tissue from their flippers and shoulders, and shipped the samples to a genetics expert at the University of Georgia. <\/em>Surely the cold, hard light of DNA testing would reveal the answer.<\/p>\n The analysis, however, proved unenlightening. According to unpublished genetic tests, the likelihood that Bermuda\u2019s turtle is descended from either Floridian or Costa Rican stock is less than 10 percent. Meylan\u2019s current hypothesis is that the migrant arrived from Mexico, which also hosted a bumper turtle crop in 2015. New genetic techniques may someday provide a definitive answer, but, says Meylan, \u201cThe female turtle\u2019s origin will have to remain a mystery for the time being.\u201d<\/p>\n If that non-resolution sounds anticlimactic, well, not every scientific conundrum gets solved. And in a way, the origins of the stunning nest matter less than the simple fact of its appearance. Many scientists believe that sea turtles are too faithful to their forebears\u2019 home beaches to be effectively translocated; Meylan posits that turtles have hardwired genetic knowledge of the geomagnetic map leading them to their ancestral shores. Given the creatures\u2019 usual precision, the fact that an errant green turtle showed up in Bermuda at all is fairly remarkable.<\/p>\n There\u2019s no proof that Operation Green Turtle ever repopulated any Caribbean or neighboring beaches, and Meylan cautions against attempting more translocations without evidence. Yet at least one other effort suggests that turtle translocation is possible in some circumstances. In the 1990s, scientists managed to re-establish Kemp\u2019s ridley sea turtles on Padre Island<\/a>, Texas, to protect the dwindling species from extinction. The rigmarole of that project dwarfed even the arduousness of Operation Green Turtle: starting in 1978, biologists collected Kemp\u2019s ridley eggs in Mexico, incubated them in controlled conditions, and let the hatchlings crawl into the Padre Island surf. After a quick romp in the waves, the babies were scooped up with a dip net and transported to Galveston, Texas, to be raised in the safety of a lab for a year before release. The elaborate procedure worked: nearly two decades after the first Kemp\u2019s ridleys were turned loose, tagged females showed up on Padre Island to deposit the next generation. By 2012, more than 200 nests were being dug in Texas annually.<\/p>\n![](\"\/wp-content\/uploads\/leaders-operation-green-turtle.jpg\")
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