When Jerald Mahusay was a kid in Santo Niño, turtle eggs were so common that he and his friends played with them.

“We were always playing with the eggs,” Mahusay recalled of his childhood in the Philippines’ Palawan province. “We didn’t know why they are important.”

That has changed. In 2023, Mahusay started working as a patroller for the Large Marine Vertebrates Research Institute Philippines, or LAMAVE, an NGO that conducts marine research around the country, including a turtle monitoring project in Palawan. This year, he was promoted to head of the local patrol unit and research assistant for LAMAVE’s turtle project.

Santo Niño is in San Vicente, an agriculture and fishing municipality that is a nesting ground for olive ridley sea turtles, classified as vulnerable on the IUCN Red List. But nesting turtles and their eggs face several threats, including dogs, higher tides, more frequent storms and tourism development plans.

During peak nesting season, volunteers and local patrollers walk more than 8 kilometres in five shifts each night and early morning. When they find a turtle, they wait for her to finish nesting and shoo away dogs if needed. Before she re-enters the water, they measure her carapace, photograph the unique scute pattern on her head for identification, and take a biopsy from her fin for future genetic sampling.

Sometimes they find turtles that have been attacked by dogs.

“Some people cope better with that than others,” researcher Klara Simon said. “In the end, even though she’s dead, at least her babies survive.”

When patrollers find a nest, they dig up the eggs, count them, place them in a bucket and bring them to one of two hatcheries. Researchers found in past seasons that most, if not all, nests left in situ on the beach were eaten by dogs or flooded by the tide.

Inside the hatchery, a researcher recreates the dimensions of the original nest and places the eggs in. The nests are checked daily every few hours. About two months after the eggs are laid, they start to hatch.

In the early mornings or evenings, researchers and local patrollers take the hatchlings that surfaced that day, sometimes 100 at once, and place them on the shore. Once in the sea, only about one in 1,000 will survive until adulthood. That survivor will spend up to 15 years at sea before reaching sexual maturity and returning to the island where it was born.

San Vicente has also seen more tourism in recent years. Century Properties purchased 56 hectares with plans to build a beachfront resort. Megaworld Corporation has broken ground on “Paragua Coastown,” expected to cover 462 hectares. On its website, Megaworld advertises San Vicente as “an undiscovered haven ready to welcome you.”

Residents have mixed feelings about more development, according to Mahusay.

“Excited, but sometimes nervous,” he said.

For now, dogs remain the biggest threat to the turtles. Many are cared for by residents, while others are strays. San Vicente has a local ordinance that prohibits the presence of strays and authorizes an animal shelter, but the ordinance is not enforced and the municipality lacks the resources to build and staff an animal shelter.

Researchers tried another approach after noticing a concentration of dead nesters and predated nests in one part of the beach. They approached the land’s caretaker, Reymundo Munding, who owns eight dogs.

“We talked to him and we included him in the patrols,” project leader Kalei Suza said.

Munding later agreed to let LAMAVE build a fenced enclosure on his property to contain the dogs at night. But many residents do not want their dogs fenced in, Santo Niño Barangay Secretary Veronica Estropia said.

Storms and high tides are another growing threat.

“It’s not natural for Palawan to be hit by typhoons, but because of climate change, a lot of storms have been hitting Palawan directly,” Suza said.

In January, researchers recorded the high tideline during a typhoon and compared it to the locations of nests found during patrols. If the nests had not been moved, they would have flooded.

Community involvement has become a big part of the conservation effort. Researcher Emelie Gottschling said one local patroller came to the project house on his day off to report that other locals had found a nest on the beach.

“He came with a bike to inform us that other locals found a nest on the beach,” she said. “We went there together, and they had put a blanket on top of the nest, secured with stones, to mark where the nest was and to protect it from the dogs.”

Last season and preliminary data from this season show that in the hatcheries, around 75 percent of the eggs in a nest will hatch, according to LAMAVE. Roldán Valverde, scientific director of the Sea Turtle Conservancy in Florida, said relocating eggs to hatcheries should only be used as a last resort, though he said it is a good sign if hatchlings are released quickly after they emerge.

“But it calls for an expansion of community efforts. We need people to know and own the responsibility of taking care of the turtles,” Suza said.

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