Kendrapara:
An Olive Ridley Turtle, first tagged with a tracking device attached to a satellite at Gahirmatha Beach in Kendrapara district of Odisha, has covered a distance of about 1,000 km in the sea in 51 days to reach the Andhra Pradesh coast, an official said on Friday.
He said that the turtle discovered the water from Sri Lanka, Puducherry and Tamil Nadu before reaching the coast of neighboring Andhra Pradesh.
“The turtle navigated through seawater in Sri Lanka, Tamil Nadu and Puducherry, and reached the Andhra Pradesh coast in 51 days. It was about 1,000 kilometers,” the official said.
The latest satellite tracking map of the Wildlife Institute of India (WII) has located one of the tagged tags going into seawater in Andhra Pradesh, and has found that it is about 1,000 km away, the chief patron of Forest (PCCF) Prem Shankar Jha said.
Four years ago, a turtle tagged with a trekking device in Odisha had recently covered a distance of 3,500 km to lay eggs on a beach in Ratnagiri district of Maharashtra.
Olive Ridley Turtles transform into millions for nest nests along the Odisha coast every year. Gahiramath Beach, away from the Bay of Bengal in Kendrapara district, has been acclaimed as the world’s largest known nests of the world’s largest known nest.
Aquatic animals also turn into the mouth of the Rashikulya River in Ganjam district and in the mouth of the Devi River in Puri to hunt large nests.
According to officials, about 3,000 turtles are tagged with a tracking device annually.
Experts believed that at least 1 million turtles must be tagged to get better information on their breeding biology, movements and growth rates, migrant routes and forging areas.
The Odisha Forest Department conducted tagging exercises in 1999, and at least two tagged turtles were then seen on the Sri Lanka coast.
Later, the tagging exercise was suspended, and the Zoological Survey of India (ZSI) resumed the practice in 2021.
Officials said that between 2021 and 2024, about 12,000 turtles were tagged in the nest grounds of the Gahirmath and Rashikulya River.
(Except for the headline, the story has not been edited by NDTV employees and is published by a syndicated feed.)
