Turtle experts are delighted as, in the last three days, 52 female adult olive ridley sea turtles (Lepidochelys olivacea), which were tagged by the Zoological Society of India (ZSI) from 2021-23 on the Odisha coast, have returned to the Rushikulya river mouth in Ganjam district to lay eggs, said officials. The four-km-long mass rookery, which saw the nesting of around 2.2 lakh olive ridley sea turtles, is reported to have started at the river mouth on Sunday.

Speaking to media, Anil Mohapatra, a senior scientist and officer-in-charge of the Estuarine Biology Research Centre (EBRC), the regional centre of the ZSI, said they were expecting numbers to increase at the end of the mass nesting period.

Most of the recaptured turtles were tagged in the Rushikulya river mouth rookery in 2020-23 under the tagging of the olive ridley turtle programme carried out jointly by the ZSI and the forest department, Mohapatra said. During this period, the scientists of ZSI tagged around 15,000 turtles at the Rushikulya rookery and Gahiramatha Marine Sanctuary.

Photographs of the tags from the turtles were collected, Mohapatra said, and detailed studies will be conducted on them. In 2023, his team recaptured over 100 tagged turtles at the Rushikulya river mouth.

The ZSI and the forest department started tagging olive ridleys on the Odisha coast in January 2021 to study the movements of the marine creature. On the third day of mass nesting, hundreds of turtles were seen nesting during daytime. Mass nesting picked up after 1:30 p.m. on Tuesday, reports state. Last year, there was no mass nesting at the Rushikulya river mouth.

(With inputs from a news report)