Plan B Forum

Selfie-taking tourists and locals disrupt nesting turtles in Costa Rica

Amy Graff

Published 10:32 am, Tuesday, September 22, 2015


Unprecedented conditions attracted unwieldy numbers of people to a Costa Rican beach during a mass turtle nesting earlier this month.

The mob disrupted thousands of female olive ridley turtles laying their eggs at the Ostional Wildlife Refuge in Guanacaste on the country's Pacific Coast.

Selfie-taking tourists and locals stepped around the pregnant turtles crawling from the ocean onto the sand. Some parents put their children on the turtles' backs to capture Facebook-worthy shots. Many used flash photography and trampled over nests.

Adding to the mayhem, locals flocked to the beach to collect the turtles' eggs, which are a Costa Rican delicacy.

Several sea turtles responded to the chaos by turning around and returning to the ocean without laying eggs, the Tico Times reports.

The turtle's nesting season at Ostional Beach runs August through October during rainy season. The beach can be difficult to reach when the ancient reptiles arrive en masse each year because the heavy rains create river swells that flow over the bridges. But this year, the river is nearly dry due to a low rainfall from El Niño, providing optimal conditions for accessing the beach.

About 1,000 turtles land on the shore during a typical nesting, or arribadas, but on the weekend of September 5, some 5,000 showed up and covered the beach, creating a spectacular sight.

The combination of the weather and an extraordinarily large nesting occurring on a weekend drew unheard-of crowds.

Three national police officers appeared on the scene to help two park rangers manage the situation, but they were unable to push the mob off the beach.

The Environment Ministry's Workers Union (SITRAMINAE) wrote on its Facebook that "appropriate measures were not taken to control the tourism that hampered the natural process" and an investigation is underway.

Tour guides are required to obtain permits to bring groups onto the beach and many followed the rules but others snuck onto the beach without permission and some locals posed as guides.

Photographer Sean Norton visited the beach to see the turtles and said in an interview that he paid what he thinks was a "registered and official guide to enter the beach." But he adds, "It appeared to me that locals had blocked off and were charging at other entry points. I had the distinct feeling these were't at all official. Rather, it looked as though some locals were profiteering possibly without any real regard for the numbers being admitted onto the beach."

Norton adds that the official guides were encouraging their groups to be respectful of the turtles. "One guide was observed flipping over a turtle that was overturned by a wave," Norton said. "Our guide also sought to ensure we stayed together, didn't interfere with the nesting process, and insisted we leave the beach at dusk."

What's more, a large majority of the people on the beach were locals cleaning eggs and stuffing them in garbage bags. The harvesting of eggs is legal and regulated at Ostional Bech and some 4.5 million are collected here each year, according to the Tico Times. This number seems high, but it's reportedly 1 percent less than the total eggs laid. With the weekend's massive nesting, large numbers of locals crowded the nests, grabbing handfuls of soft-shelled eggs.

bigskygal wrote:Humans are a plague on nature.

dales wrote:

Margaret Sanger has been lauded by some as a woman of valor, but a closer look reveals that Planned Parenthood’s audacious founder had some unsavory things to say about matters of race, birth control, and abortion. An outspoken eugenicist herself, Sanger consistently promoted racist ideals with a contemptuous attitude.

margaretsanger4Read on to learn why Planned Parenthood hides behind a false memory of Sanger, and why, despite her extraordinarily prolific writing career, one rarely sees her quoted by Planned Parenthood leaders and apologists.


The most merciful thing that the large family does to one of its infant members is to kill it.

Woman and the New Race, ch. 6: “The Wickedness of Creating Large Families.” Here, Sanger argues that, because the conditions of large families tend to involve poverty and illness, it is better for everyone involved if a child’s life is snuffed out before he or she has a chance to pose difficulties to its family.


[We should] apply a stern and rigid policy of sterilization and segregation to that grade of population whose progeny is tainted, or whose inheritance is such that objectionable traits may be transmitted to offspring.

“Plan for Peace” from Birth Control Review (April 1932, pp. 107-108)


Article 1. The purpose of the American Baby Code shall be to provide for a better distribution of babies… and to protect society against the propagation and increase of the unfit.
Article 4. No woman shall have the legal right to bear a child, and no man shall have the right to become a father, without a permit…
Article 6. No permit for parenthood shall be valid for more than one birth.

“America Needs a Code for Babies,” 27 Mar 1934


Give dysgenic groups [people with “bad genes”] in our population their choice of segregation or [compulsory] sterilization.

April 1932 Birth Control Review, pg. 108


Birth control must lead ultimately to a cleaner race.

Woman, Morality, and Birth Control. New York: New York Publishing Company, 1922. Page 12.


We should hire three or four colored ministers, preferably with social-service backgrounds, and with engaging personalities. The most successful educational approach to the Negro is through a religious appeal. We don’t want the word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.

Margaret Sanger’s December 19, 1939 letter to Dr. Clarence Gamble, 255 Adams Street, Milton, Massachusetts. Also described in Linda Gordon’s Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right: A Social History of Birth Control in America. New York: Grossman Publishers, 1976.


A woman’s duty: To look the whole world in the face with a go-to-hell look in the eyes… to speak and act in defiance of convention.

The Woman Rebel, Volume I, Number 1


[The most penetrating thinkers] are coming to see that a qualitative factor as opposed to a quantitative one is of primary importance in dealing with the great masses of humanity.


Pivot of Civilization, 1922. Here, Margaret Sanger speaks on her eugenic philosophy – that only the types of “quality” people she and her peers viewed as worthy of life should be allowed to live.


Such parents swell the pathetic ranks of the unemployed. Feeble-mindedness perpetuates itself from the ranks of those who are blandly indifferent to their racial responsibilities. And it is largely this type of humanity we are now drawing upon to populate our world for the generations to come. In this orgy of multiplying and replenishing the earth, this type is pari passu multiplying and perpetuating those direst evils in which we must, if civilization is to survive, extirpate by the very roots.

The Need for Birth Control in America (quoted by Angela Franks.)


Women of the working class, especially wage workers, should not have more than two children at most. The average working man can support no more and and the average working woman can take care of no more in decent fashion.

“Family Limitation,” eighth edition revised, 1918

That being said, yes Sanger espoused some views regarding eugenics that are distasteful to us now but which were widespread in her time - one needs to judge her in context, not by today's standards.

Crackpot wrote:The bible promotes slavry you know....

Crackpot wrote:Most of the founding fathers were slave owners....