Tales from the Reef: Swimming with Turtles at Reethi Rah

I thought it was about time I blogged about the amazing Turtle Adventure trip that we do here… I even made a video

Reethi Rah is lucky enough to have a Hawksbill turtle feeding ground very close by known as “Turtle Reef”. It’s a beautiful site, amazing fish life and of course the turtles. Out of all the places I have snorkeled and dived over the Maldives this reef is truly unique. Not only can you guarantee seeing turtles in their natural habitat but you can really have some up close and personal encounters with these ancient marine reptiles. Most of the turtles are very relaxed, the shy ones will swim away but the ones that are not phased by people will sometimes swim along with you, or even come up for a breath of air right in front of you, a very cool sight to see.

The lifecycle of a turtle is pretty straight forward, when the hatchlings crawl out of the nest and first enter the water, they swim out to the open sea. They will spend the first couple of years out in the open ocean to avoid predators, and to basically eat and grow, and then when they reach dinner plate size they return inshore to a feeding ground. The turtle will spend most of its life at this feeding ground just leaving periodically to mate and nest.

Most reefs were you might happen to see a turtle, well generally the turtle will take one look at you and take off very quickly…. but not at Turtle Reef. As it’s a feeding ground and home to the majority of the turtles that we see, I think that they don’t feel threatened when they see people, and therefore they don’t swim away. They are nearly always eating, using their long beaks to probe into spaces between corals to find sponges and invertebrates to eat. Turtle Reef is covered in a green zooanthid, an invertebrate, which the turtles love to eat. When they are eating, they really don’t seem bothered by all the people looking down at them. Sometimes the turtles will look up at you, as if to say, “not these crazy people again”… and then just carry on eating!!

I do like to think I know some of these turtles personally now, I recognize the common ones I see and now many of them have names. Turtles have a unique scale pattern on each side of the head, kind of like a finger print so you can identify them, but I also recognise them by the patterns of encrusting coralline algae growing on their shells. All the turtles I see are photographed and uploaded into a photo identification database to try to establish their population size, foraging sites and migration patterns. So far I have identified over 60 different turtles from Turtle Reef and then about 25 different turtles from another reef called West Point.

The majority are female turtles, Spot, Ringo, Crush, Samha, Reina, to name a few of the regulars, then there are only 3 males that I have recorded, Marvin, Badhur and Ali. The males have a long tail which is how you can tell them apart from the females, well we all know it’s not really a tail!!! There are also lots of juveniles on the reef as well which is great, they are so cute, there is Junior, Kurumbas, Mona, Bear, Noah…. Generally every month I see one or two new turtles as well, sometimes they may stay a while or sometimes they are just passing by.

So out of the thousands of photos I have of these turtles, here are some of my favourite shots of the common turtles that I see, I wonder if they recognise me as much as I recognise all of them…