Green turtle: silent guardian of Pakistan’s shores

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Dr. Farrukh A. Chishtie

On moonlit winter nights along the Arabian Sea, a heavy shape rises from the surf at Sandspit or Daran Beach. She is a green turtle, Chelonia mydas, a creature that has crossed oceans for decades and now returns, with ancient precision, to the strip of sand that first received her.

Slowly, painfully, the green turtle drags her weight above the tide line, scoops a flask-shaped nest with her back flippers, and begins to lay a clutch of soft, white eggs. Each egg is a sealed promise, a fragile vessel carrying the genetic code of a lineage that has survived since the age of dinosaurs.

For Pakistan, the green turtle is both a global success story and a local warning. At the global level, decades of conservation have helped the species recover enough that the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) recently downlisted it from “Endangered” to “Least Concern” on the Red List. Yet this change does not mean safety along every coastline. In Pakistan’s waters, green turtles remain under serious pressure, and they continue to be treated as threatened, legally protected species that need active safeguarding if their nesting beaches and nearshore feeding grounds are to survive.

Two species of marine turtles regularly occur along Pakistan’s coast, the olive ridley and the green turtle, with the latter forming the bulk of recorded nesting. Key rookeries lie close to Karachi at the Hawksbay–Sandspit stretch, a 20-kilometre belt that has hosted thousands of nests in good years, and along the Makran coast at Ormara Turtle Beaches, Pasni, Gwadar and Jiwani’s Daran Beach.  Sandspit and Hawksbay are also famous in Pakistan as the “turtle beaches” where, for decades, the Sindh Wildlife Department and WWF-Pakistan have operated hatcheries and awareness programmes for schoolchildren and visitors.

The life of a green turtle is written in migrations that are almost impossible to imagine at human scale. A female may spend years feeding over offshore seagrass meadows and algal beds, then navigate back to the same region where she once hatched, using the Earth’s magnetic field and coastal cues that science is only beginning to decode. On Pakistan’s beaches she lays, on average, more than a hundred eggs per nest, sometimes repeating the effort several times in a season. After about two months of incubation in sun-warmed sand, hatchlings cut their way out and, in a frantic scramble, race towards the brightest horizon, which in a natural setting is the glitter of moonlight on the sea.

Ecologically, the green turtle is a gardener of the sea. As a mostly herbivorous adult, it grazes on seagrass and algae, keeping meadows short and healthy. This continuous trimming prevents the beds from becoming overgrown, promotes new growth, and supports fish nurseries and invertebrate communities that depend on clean, oxygenated habitat. In this way, every turtle that glides through a seagrass meadow along the Baluchistan coast is also maintaining a living pantry for countless other species, including fish on which coastal communities rely.

The species’ apparent global recovery hides the intensity of local threats. Along Pakistan’s shores, green turtles face a tight net of risks. Rapid coastal development and unregulated construction near Hawksbay and Sandspit have narrowed nesting space and brought bright lights, vehicles, and noise directly onto the beaches. Artificial lighting confuses hatchlings, which may crawl inland towards streetlamps instead of seaward, where they die from exhaustion, predation, or dehydration.

In the water, entanglement in fishing gear remains one of the most serious dangers. Gillnets set for fish can easily snare a turtle that surfaces to breathe, leading to drowning within minutes. Studies and field reports from Karachi and Makran document stranded turtles with net marks and amputated flippers where they struggled against monofilament mesh. Plastic pollution adds a quieter, chronic threat: floating bags and packaging can be mistaken for jellyfish or macroalgae and swallowed, blocking the gut or slowly weakening the animal.

On the nesting beaches themselves, eggs and hatchlings are vulnerable to stray dogs, crows, and opportunistic human collection. Research from Daran Beach at Jiwani notes that without active nest guarding and protective wire cages, predation rates can be high enough to wipe out most clutches in a season. Climate change is now adding another layer of risk. Because sand temperature influences turtle sex ratios, hotter nests tend to produce more females, threatening the long-term balance of populations. Rising seas and stronger storms can also erode the very beaches the turtles need to reproduce.

Despite these pressures, Pakistan’s coast also tells a story of determined care. Since the late 1970s, the Sindh Wildlife Department has run a long-term turtle conservation programme at Hawksbay and Sandspit, relocating at-risk nests to fenced hatcheries, tagging adult females, and releasing hundreds of thousands of hatchlings back to the Arabian Sea. In Baluchistan, the Wildlife Department, WWF-Pakistan and local communities collaborate at sites like Daran Beach and Astola Island, where nests are fenced, patrols reduce poaching, and awareness campaigns emphasise the cultural and ecological value of turtles.

Legal frameworks reinforce this work. All sea turtles in Pakistan are protected under provincial wildlife laws, and important rookeries such as Ormara Turtle Beaches are recognised internationally as Ramsar sites, highlighting their global biodiversity significance. International projects supported by agencies such as UNDP’s Small Grants Programme have helped build local capacity, from training community rangers to supporting alternative livelihoods that reduce pressure on turtle habitats.

For readers, perhaps the most important message is that the fate of the green turtle is closely tied to everyday choices. Avoiding litter on beaches, respecting “no-go” nesting zones, supporting policies that limit destructive coastal construction, and choosing seafood from fisheries that minimise turtle bycatch all contribute to a safer future for these ancient mariners. School visits to turtle hatcheries and wetland centres at Sandspit and Hawksbay show that children respond with deep curiosity and empathy when they see a tiny hatchling released to the waves; that early connection may be one of the strongest protections the species can have.

Pakistan’s green turtles are not just symbols on conservation posters. They are living links between land and sea, between present communities and deep evolutionary time. Their slow, deliberate journeys from beach to ocean and back again remind us that some forms of life require patience, quiet and long horizons. If we can keep our coasts dark enough, clean enough and gentle enough for a female turtle to return and nest safely, we are not only saving a species. We are also proving that our relationship with the Arabian Sea can be both respectful and enduring, for turtles and for ourselves.