Lessons from the Sea Turtles
Florida is about Sea Turtles. Your results may vary. For me, the Dry Tortugas was about learning about independence.
“The key is to learn how to help without creating dependency.”
Florida is a more complicated story than the others because there’s a lot of overlapping parts. This is a life experience taken during the OA Ocean Adventure program through the BSA’s Florida Sea Base. Florida became about a lot of other things all at once, so I have split up the Florida stories to have it’s lesson be self contained and standalone.
The Sea Turtle story is a life experience I cherish as a core foundational value, If you’re looking for the overview and recap of OAOA, that is probably posted somewhere else, maybe…
With this, I want to share an anecdote about the sea turtle. This is a very important lesson to me; I have spent a ton of time thinking about it. I do not know how factually correct it is, but it was a lesson shared with me while I was on island. It may be more inspirational than scientific. I want to pass on the story - It goes like this.
Sea Turtles are Struggling.
Life is hard, after all; this is how it goes. Their population is being threatened by a number of factors, and some build off of each other. These are the problems with sea turtles:
They are being hunted by predators,
their habitat is being taken over by humans,
and they endure hardship during a vulnerable part of their life cycle.
Life is hardest during their beginning.
Nature is wonderful, though. Due to these struggles, the sea turtle has adapted in a couple of key ways, but the problem is not eliminated.
The Ordeal of the Sea Turtles
Nature is beautiful and it’s creatures are smart. The sea turtles behave in a very particular way and it is solely to meet the challenges life has given them. The sea turtles have a strategy that gives them the greatest chance at success:
Dig Out at Night
The eggs are vulnerable on the shore, so the parents have learned to bury the eggs in the sand to obscure them from predators. The hatchlings themselves also know this danger, so they wait until nighttime to burrow out of the sand and sprint to the water. In the dark the foes like crabs, birds, and others have a harder time hunting. Still though, almost all the hatchlings will not make it to the water. Only the ones who are strengthened through their digging, nimble in their running… and lucky, will make it to the water.
Waiting until night poses a new self-inflicted challenge to the sea turtle. In life choices you make bring additional challenges in addition to the benefits the decisions may reap. The next question to the sea turtle is how they will know where the water is when they hatch?
The most interesting thing that the sea turtles do is how they learn to navigate. I do not know if the hatchlings know about the dangers of the harsh world, but they seem to have the keen ability to use details about their world to get them to where they need to go.
Navigate by Moonlight
A sea turtle navigates by moonlight. Here’s the way it makes sense to me: At night, the brightest source of light is the moon above. The water makes for a great mirror surface that would reflect this light - much more than sand, anyway. So it makes sense to me that in the dark of night, the brightest source of light, in theory, should be, the water; where the horizon is reflecting the moonlight.
The sea turtle, therefore, follows the light of the moon.
This is beautiful to me. The idea that this inert sense of survival and decision making to trust in your own observations to lead to your safe outcome.
There is a problem, though, and it’s the part where human’s are to blame, as is often the case.
Avoid False Moonlight
The human problem: This is a challenge created unrelated to the sea turtle, but is another self-inflicted challenge that comes from decision making. The sea turtle follows the brightest source of light that they hope will lead to water - but humans have come to find that living on beaches in the beauty of the natural world is a wonderful thing. We have built brightly lit highways and have placed houses all along the shore.
The tragedy of the sea turtle is this:
A sea turtle believes it is following moonlight.
This source of light leads them into busy highways, and into the residential areas opposite to the direction of the water.
A sea turtle believes it is making the right decision, but they are following the wrong path. How could it know? Sometimes the paths we walk we believe are right. If we were a sea turtle we may believe we are following the path to the water, but the city lights in their shine are distracting.
The saddest part of the life of the sea turtle is seeing a wrong course and not being able to do anything to help.
How Can We Help?
Can we interfere? It is noble to want to be a knight in shining armor and rescue another you see on a wrong path. However, reality is much more complicated and bleak.
The lesson we should learn from the sea turtle is to learn how to help.
Consequences of “Help”
The most basic reaction to observing a sea turtle - to a good human, I assume, at least, is to want to help.
In the ordeals of the sea turtle, there are many places you could help:
You may see that the buried eggs in sand are really far from the water, or maybe you see them hatch and want to help get them to the water. That would be a mistake.
Here is the problem with the beach walk:
Through digging in the sand, the sea turtle gets stronger. Without digging, a sea turtle will not be strong enough to quickly run across the sand to the water.
Through running across the water, a sea turtle continues building in strength, and without the run, when it reaches the water the sea turtle will not be able to swim long or fast enough to make it to the deeper oceans where they are safer from fish.
You cannot help a sea turtle by the obvious interventions because it is through the ordeals of the sea turtle that their life leads to success.
So How Can We Actually Help?
The way to help a sea turtle is to learn to help without creating dependency. It is to learn to help in minor ways that allow the challenges to be there, but to minimize their cost of failure.
This stated method is to create a controlled environment. A place where it is safe to fail because it instills growth without deadly costs.
There are groups that do this to help the sea turtle, and that is who I learned this story from.
They said they sometimes collect sea turtle eggs when they see them on beaches that are too close to humans or other threats, and they keep them safe until it is time for them to hatch. Then, they take them out and bury them in the sand and sit and watch.
On the night that the hatchlings hatch, they see them emerge and make their way to the water.
If the hatchlings get turned around, they block off the wrong path with their hands so that the sea turtles have to turn and reorient themselves. They make their way to the water, and from there, they hope that their limited interaction has made a difference in the life of the sea turtle.
To participate in this sort of activity is an eye opening experience. You watch them dig, run, swim, and thrive.
The Story of the Sea Turtle
I was told this story of the sea turtle, and then I sat isolated on the shore of Loggerhead Key for a long part of the day as I sat watching the tide, the ocean, the horizon, the beach, and the sea turtle nest. I sat there in the evening, through sunset, and into the night, as I compared the sea turtle to humans. In a wonderful way, the sea turtle teaches us great lessons that I believe are transferable.
What I love about the sea turtle is its strength to face challenges to reach success. It reminded me of Lakes and Portages, the idea that to have ‘good’ you have to endure ‘hardship’, and the sea turtle is a great model for that. What I can’t imagine is the difficulty in life at such an early stage, I have a lot of respect for the hatchling, and a lot of sympathy for the hundreds of hatchlings that do not make it. The sea turtle does not live a sheltered life without risk, its life is frontloaded with danger, but the happy ending for the sea turtle is what happens when they reach the water.
When a sea turtle reaches the deeper part of the ocean after it’s sea sprint, it will swim for years without stopping as it matures and ages. It seems the happy ending for the sea turtle begins out here after its ordeal, for the most part. Its not entirely a lovely story but it’s an impactful one.
The Symbolism
I have some radical personal views on life that have been in part learned from the sea turtles, and experienced in life.
To me in the most direct way, the Sea Turtle is people I try to help, guide, and mentor.
I have failed a lot in my quest to “help” a lot before, and now I do my best to remember the sea turtle in my strategy.
Let me tell you - it is hard. It is very hard. It is hard to sit back and decide how to help.
It is hard to watch people when ‘you believe you know better’. In those cases I challenge myself to question my own moonlight and wonder if the light I’m following is a different light source as them. Sometimes someone failing in a controlled, safe environment is the best outcome you can hope for rather than severing a friendship by appearing judgmental, egotistical, or altruistic.
It is hard to not lead the way and say follow me I can help. In those cases dragging someone out of their own moose muck doesn’t do anything to strengthen them to walk the portage without you. Rescuing someone from a hole they either did or didn’t dig for themselves is not sustainable; often times they will end up falling again.
It is hard to wait, but in my experience it is best to not offer help until it is requested. People don’t like unsolicited advice. Then when it is requested, it is up to you to choose the right way to help.
It is hard, but life is hard.
To me the false moonlight - aka the city lights, the bright houses, the land - are the temptations humans are led to believing it is their destination. They seek moonlight, which is… I don’t know, happiness? But they do not go to the water.
To me false moonlight is subservience to substances, bad influences, easy crutches, and darkness. The bright city lights may be flashy, but they are distracting. Sea turtles are getting run over in the highway all in a misguided quest for happiness and perpetuity.
Following the wrong light is not in our control, the perspective we have shapes our reality so we cannot fathom things outside of our line of sight. Is that fair? It’s not fair, but it happens to sea turtles, too. The only advantage we can have, is we can be aware that “false moonlight” exists, and be wary of it. We can be critical of our source, and we can take a perspective pause to see what we think of our light source. In this, knowledge of the world benefits course navigation. The sea turtle that doesn’t know about the dangers of the city does not know why light source matters.
