Parismina is wicked humid; bright and shiny humid, and over 90ยบ after midday. As a plus, all that sun helps my Chaco tan lines make a reappearance, which makes me happy.
It cools down a bit at night, but it doesn’t really get tolerable until after midnight, which is the one blessing of the midnight to 4am shift. The other thing nice about that shift is that Joshua gets chatty.
He told us a story. To understand this story, you have to understand that turtles follow light, sound, and vibration, in that order. So one time in Parismina, on a night the bar was particularly hopping, Some baby turtles decided they’d rather go dancing than head out to sea.
Everybody had to stop what they were doing and take the babies out to the beach, where they had to sit with them until the babies regained their night vision and lost their confusion. This takes about an hour.
The night Joshua told us this story, we found a nest that had hatched earlier. When a clutch hatches out, often all that’s left are eggs with dead turtles and eggs that never had anything inside. These empty eggs, when backlit by with red torchlight, glow like some odd and polished rose quartz.
One of the jobs of the volunteers is to see, when a clutch hatches, if there are any turtles needing help. There maybe some still in the clutch hole, but also, crabs like to trap the baby turtles and then snack on them later.
Joshua went and picked up some crabs to check they weren’t munching on our babies. They weren’t. It seemed all the turtles that survived the whole process of becoming turtles made it to the ocean. Where the tarpons probably got many of them. That’s why Joshua said eating tarpons was a good idea, though.
