A Day Talking Sea Turtles at a School in Sinai, Egypt, 2000.

In 2000 I worked on a sea turtle conservation project in Egypt, researching nesting distribution along the Mediterranean shoreline of northern Sinai. At the time little was known about where turtles nested along these beaches, and our study was the first to research the area between Port Said at the northern end of the Suez Canal in the west, and the border with Palestine and the Gaza Strip in the east. The main aim of our research was to a) find out where sea turtles nested along this 200km stretch of shoreline, and b) to estimate hatching success of each nest, i.e. how many of the eggs that were laid resulted in a turtle hatchling leaving the nest.

During the summer season female sea turtles crawl out of the ocean and up the shore at night time to nest, mainly where lights are low and human activity is at a minimum, leaving characteristic tracks as they do so. Once they have found a suitable spot - and so long as they are not disturbed - they will dig a small hole in the sand and lay upwards of sixty eggs at a time before covering the nest over and returning back to the sea. These eggs hatch approximately two months later, the hatchlings venturing down the beach and out to sea.

Working with my Egyptian colleagues we conducted daily surveys of sections of the northern Sinai beachfront over the summer looking for turtle tracks; if we found tracks we would then ascertain if a nest had been made and eggs laid in it, before recording the location and leaving it alone. Nests were then returned to on a regular basis thereafter, especially towards the end of the two month incubation period. By revisiting nests and counting the shells that were left behind, which would often have incomplete embryos in them, we were able to estimate the hatching success of each nest.

Towards the end of my time in Egypt my team and I gave a talk about sea turtles to a junior school in the town of Sheikh Zuweid, near Rafah at the Egyptian border with the Gaza Strip. Most of the children were from Bedouin families and hardly any of them had seen a Westerner like me before! They had, however, seen turtle tracks and quite a few of them had dug up the eggs to eat; others had also consumed turtles caught by fishermen even though under Egyptian law it is illegal to do either. Likewise, many Bedouin women drink the iron-rich turtle blood as it is believed to help boost fertility. Yet the fact remains that the number of sea turtles in the Mediterranean Sea has sadly declined massively over the last few decades, and continues to do so.

So we were asked by the Egyptian Environmental Affairs Agency to talk to the children and their parents about the turtles, in the hope that in time perhaps they would act as the turtle’s future guardians. Class by class we went around the school talking about the natural history of these incredible animals, to the delight and intrigue of everyone, for most knew next to nothing about them! We also gave out notepads with pictures of turtles on the front and back with writing about their life-cycle inside, and we spent hours answering question after question about these animals which have been around since dinosaur times! The kids were fascinated!

Admittedly my Arabic wasn’t that great, in fact very basic, so it was my Egyptian colleagues who did most of the talking. But thankfully I had remembered to bring a camera with me, and I was able to capture the amazing attentive faces of these wonderful children, as well as the joy and excitement they expressed at having an ‘outsider’ and someone ‘new’ come to their school for the day! It really was a fun and eventful day, as I hope the pictures show. But the true magic for me was that last year I was contacted by one of the girls who I photographed at that school after she had seen a photo that I had posted online. Back then in 2000 she was 9 years old, but now she was 29, Dr Hasan, a dentist, and running her own dental practice in Cairo! And although she didn’t end up as a marine ecologist like me, she sure remembered all about the life-cycle of the sea turtle and that incredibly enjoyable day when I came to visit and talk to her school about the animals.