Opening the nest


Toulipa Goulimyi volunteers monitor the hatching of the sea turtle nests. Ten days after the first hatchling turtles have been observed leaving a nest, it is time to open the nest. Here, ARCHELON-trained project leader Maria Aronis makes a record of the eggs in this nest on Limnes beach. Two surviving turtles that were in the nest but had not made it to the surface are swimming in the plastic bowl. Near Maria, you can see six dead hatchlings that did not make it out of the nest. Next are 24 eggs that did not hatch. Finally, all the empty shells of the eggs that did hatch are laid out in rows of ten: 60 hatched eggs. Six of those did not survive. But 54 turtles did successfully make it out of the nest alive. We don’t know how many made it successfully into the sea — hopefully most of them did. Toulipa Goulimyi records all these statistics for each nest that has been identified during the season and sends them to ARCHELON at the end of the season.
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