Over one lakh turtles have laid eggs along Rushikulya coast

In a rare sight after a gap of seven years, mass nesting of olive ridley turtles was witnessed during the daytime along the Rushikulya rookery coast in Odisha’s Ganjam district

According to Berhampur Divisional Forest Officer (DFO), Amlan Nayak, at around 2 a.m., 2,000 mother olive ridleys started coming out of the sea to the beach early on Saturday. The nesting went on till the sunrise. By Sunday evening, around one lakh mother olive ridleys had nested.

Usually, olive ridleys prefer to nest in darkness. “Sometimes due to pressure of delivery time, they may be opting to nest at daytime,” said Bivash Pandav, scientist of Wild Life Institute of India (WII), who has been studying olive ridleys for over two decades now.

Each nest dug up by the turtles, on an average, contains around 100 eggs. The incubation period is around 45 days.