4 tagged Olive Ridleys back in Gahirmatha to lay eggs
- Kendra pada: Four female Olive Ridley turtles which were tagged in Gahirmatha beach of Kendra pada district in 2021, returned to Nasi-2 Island on March 12 to lay eggs. "We spotted four female turtles with metallic flipper tags," said Bichitrananda Behera, the forest range officer of Gahirmatha, adding that more than 5,00,000 turtles have already laid eggs at the world's largest rookery since March 9.
- "All the four turtles were tagged in 2021 at Gahirmatha by the Zoological Survey of India (ZSI). The finding of the four tagged turtles in Gahirmatha proves that female turtles often come to the same beach to lay eggs," said Dr Basudev Tripathy, a noted turtle Hiremath," he added. researcher and a senior scientist of ZSI at its western regional center in Pune.
- A tagged sea turtle was also found on January 12 on Beruwala beach in Sri Lanka. The turtle was tagged on April 2, 2022, at Rushikulya in Ganjam district.
- "Sea turtles throughout the world are known to migrate thousands of kilometers between their nesting beaches and feeding grounds. The tagging helps us in studying the turtles' migratory routes and areas of foraging," Tripathy said. "We fitted metallic flipper tags on some 3,000 turtles in the last three years at Rushikulya and Gahirmatha," he added.
- The state forest department in collaboration with the Wildlife Institute of India (WII), Dehradun, had fitted tags on the flippers of around 35,000 turtles from 1996 to 1999 in Gahirmatha, Rushikulya and Devi River mouth.