Green turtle: An icon with a story to tell

The journey began for this green turtle in the far north of our Great Barrier Reef, on a tiny, sandy sanctuary called Raine Island. Here, one summer almost 50 years ago, she and hundreds of her brothers and sisters emerged from their underground nest and took their first look at the world above the sand. Decades on, it is likely she is the only survivor of her clutch. Just one in a thousand will reach adulthood.

Green turtle hatchlings measure just a few centimetres and make an easy meal for waiting predators. Each nesting season, hungry birds with sharp beaks line the beaches of Raine, and sharks lurk in the shallows. Speed was her saviour as she crawled the long, dangerous gauntlet from nest to Reef.

Like all youngsters leaving home for the first time, she hit the open road, travelling the ocean currents. Thanks to a steady diet of sponges and seaweed, our turtle slowly grew in strength and size. Around her, the planet was changing too. She had to learn to avoid new challenges – plastic now polluted her home, and more and more boat propellers and fishing nets crowded the water, threatening to tangle and break her growing flippers. Nevertheless, she persisted.

After a decade of life on the road, she navigated her way across entire oceans using her incredible brain like a magnetic compass to return home to shallower coastal waters, rich with her favourite foods. By now her home is a dedicated Marine Park, with areas protected by humans, where six of the seven other marine turtle species have found sanctuary and rich foraging grounds. Over the next 40 years, her shell carries an entire unique ecosystem of tiny hitchhikers – crustaceans, algae, and mollusks – on her trips up and down the Reef.

She notices a new change, as the waters grow slowly warmer each year and the corals beneath her turn white during the summer months as a sign of their stress. And yet she is also witnesses visiting humans working to protect her home – planting new corals and sea grasses and keeping the water clean.

At almost 50, she too is ready to have her own babies. By now, she has mated and grown her eggs for several weeks. In a miracle of biology, she emerges from the waves on to the exact beach of her birth, just like her mother and grandmother did before her, and crawls across the sand for the first time in half a century. It takes almost three hours to dig her nest, lay her eggs and cover them safely. By daybreak she is exhausted and slowly returns to the water.