Occasionally, the eggs from the nursery would not hatch, and it was up to the volunteers and guides to find out why. This process called the egg exhumation, was where the eggs would be cracked open to see why they didn’t hatch. We would start by gathering up all of the volunteers and heading down to the beach. One of the volunteers would get the shovel and dig a large hole, which was where the cracked eggs would fall. Another volunteer, who could understand Spanish, would grab a clipboard to keep a tally of the reasons why the eggs didn’t hatch. Multiple volunteers would ben dove into the hole, and take a pile of unhatched eggs. Using a stick, they would crack one of the sea turtle eggs. Upon opening the eggs there would be a surprise instead. At times we would see the egg yolk and white all mixed up, and at times we would see a turtle fully formed, but not alive in the egg. The Guide would call out the reason as to why the egg didn’t hatch in Spanish at the stage of life the baby turtle had made it to. One of the reasons why the egg didn’t hatch was Batida, which translates to smoothie, implying that the egg was mixed up upon transportation!
After we had concluded the exhumation, we would cover the hole up and use the information from the clipboard to notice trends in the reasons why the turtles hadn’t been hatching!
