2024/25 volunteer Riley G uncovers the fascinating differences between the way turtles experience the world compared to us humans…
If you were a fly sitting on the shoulder of one of the NTP’s turtle tracking volunteers, you’d often hear us muttering something like “What were you thinking?” as we follow the twists and turns of turtle tracks along the beach.
Our task during morning monitoring is to follow every return track (where a turtle has gone back into the ocean) until we can figure out her last activity – whether that was a nest, some digging, or just a long wander along the sand. Sometimes that means following a track where the turtle has gone 10 metres up the beach, abruptly turned around and gone back down. Sometimes it means following a track that meanders and loops along the beach or through the dunes for 200 metres or more.
Although our job is just to figure out what the turtle did, we often find ourselves asking why they did it too. Why do they get halfway up the beach and then just turn around and go back? Why do they waste a bunch of energy walking around if they’re not even going to try and nest? Why do they nest in strange places, like under bushes or on top of massive dunes? Our task is to be scientists, recording exactly what happened and when, but when we are on the beach it feels like we are detectives, or anthropologists, or psychologists – and we’re trying to understand some of the strangest minds in the world.
Sea turtles have existed in some form for over 100 million years, and although their brains have continued to evolve , they still share many of the traits of their prehistoric ancestors. Notably, they lack a frontal cortex, which we mammals have been steadily evolving for the last 300 million years, and which is crucial to the human ability to communicate, analyse risk, and make plans. Their brains are also much smaller relative to their body size than ours, which tends to be associated with less complex cognition and behaviour. That being said, sea turtles have cognitive abilities we can hardly begin to understand, like their ability to navigate vast areas of the ocean using only their sense of the Earth’s magnetic field.
The research paints a pretty clear picture: turtles do not think like us! As humans, we look at the beach and we can analyse the topography, the weather, our goals, and the dangers at hand, before using all this information to decide what to do. To us, the turtles’ behaviours are illogical, but to them it is just pure instinct, guided by their senses and the millions of years of evolution that have shaped them. They don’t have to worry about human concerns like having an “inner monologue” or a “plan for the future”; they simply follow their needs in the present, whether that is to find food, to escape a predator, or to dig a hole and lay some eggs in the sand.
As volunteers, we are far from being experts in turtle biology. We are just regular people united by our appreciation of these wonderful animals, and it can be challenging for us to break the habit of projecting human emotions and logic onto their actions. But when we do, we unlock a new level of appreciation for the odyssey that is turtle nesting. We stop being psychologists and start being space explorers, navigating the rocky dunes and sparkling seas of another planet, marvelling at these creatures whose biology, behaviour, and minds are completely alien to ours. We may not understand what is going on inside the minds of turtles, but that doesn’t make us like them less; it just amplifies our sense of wonder and our desire to protect their uniqueness!
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