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TurtleWatch
Marsa Alam
February 2024
Underwater photos by Micol Montagna
FEBRUARY, and I am ill-prepared for the cool temperature of the water. In my mind the Red Sea is always warm and sunny; it is a friendly sea, related only abstractly to the vast and cold ocean where discomfort is a given. I have experienced its shores many times as a tourist, but as we wade into the water and put on our fins and masks, a humbling feeling reminds me that this is not tourism—it’s work.
It is my first time joining the TurtleWatch team for a field survey, and the conditions are not ideal. Today’s site is just north of Marsa Alam, and although it is a sheltered small bay, a strong northwesterly wind is blowing and underwater visibility will be low. Micol and Maja are well-prepared in their springsuits, and Micol has on a neoprene hood and boots. Weighted belts are tied to their waists and cameras are clipped to their bodies. I am wearing swimming shorts and a UV-resistant tee. As consolation, they tell me it will be less cold once we’re beyond the shallows. (I am confused as to how that works, but I believe them.)
We swim out from the sandy beach between the north and south reefs, over patches of seagrass, until a depth of fifteen meters is below us. Micol, the project coordinator at TurtleWatch, explains that we will perform a U-shaped transect to cover the area between the two reefs where turtles are most likely to be found. If we do see a turtle, Micol and Maja will dive down and snap photos of both sides of its face. Unless it is deeper than ten meters, Micol may also try to measure its carapace length. They’ll take note of what the turtle appears to be doing, and other data like water temperature may also be recorded.
The patches of seagrass thin out and a few coral islands sprout up like domes from the seafloor. A school of Indian mackerel swims by, and another school of blue fusiliers drifts just at the edge of being seen. They are given away only by their black-tipped tail fins, like a curtain of eyes watching us.
After thirty minutes we still have not found any turtles. The waves are growing more choppy and the wind more forceful. Micol, noticing the worsening conditions, begins to consider a change of course. As soon as we stop swimming I am besieged again by the cold. Micol is thinking aloud, weighing the options, not ready to give up. Before she can finish her thoughts, she’s interrupted by Maja’s breathless shout: “Dolphins!”
With a thrash of the fins we hurry to where Maja is some fifteen meters away. There, suspended in the middle of the water column, a mass of grey-silver bodies is clumped together, rolling in a gentle, affectionate embrace. Sunlight reflects off their bodies as they rub bellies and fins. It takes me a moment to realize that they are just four bottlenose dolphins. When they unglue from each other a few seconds later, we see that they are two pairs, each a watchful mother with a child following closely under her tail.
One of the young has several propellor marks on its back and what appears to be a shark bite. The other, a playful male, breaks away from his mother to joust with a trash bag floating just beneath the surface. He tosses the bag over his head and it wraps around his dorsal fin. With a shake of the body he loosens it, but the bag grabs onto his tail for a moment before finally sliding away. The young male regroups with the others and they swim away, the outlines of their bodies fusing together before fading into blue against the open sea.
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Introducing TurtleWatch’s story with a dolphin encounter is an irony I tried to avoid. However, the authenticity and spontaneity of the moment make considerations of narrative seem trivial, almost silly. My justification could simply be that this is how the survey—my first glimpse of TurtleWatch at work—unfolded, but the real point is something else. It is the essential vulnerability encapsulated within it: of us in the water prone to visits from the deep, of the dolphins as they approach a species far more dangerous than they, of the fragile balance that makes such encounters possible in the first place. It is through this lens of vulnerability that the ocean and our efforts to protect it should be seen.
For Micol, that vulnerability was slowly being replaced by routine as she slipped from conservation into the tourism industry. It was 2016 and she had been in Egypt for several years already. An Italian, Micol received her graduate degree in biology back home before finding work as a marine biologist at a resort south of Marsa Alam. She joined a couple conservation projects here and abroad, and in 2014 began working a base leader at a diving center in Abu Dabbab. That job soon turned into something like a receptionist handling check-in and check-out. Before long, Micol found herself about to turn thirty, not doing what she studied in university or wanted to be doing, and earning little money. But there was a reason to stay: she was with Abdu, her diving instructor-turned-husband. And, she adds, “At least I was in a beautiful place.”
As it turned out, it was a beautiful place with many turtles. One otherwise routine day at work, and Micol is waiting more eagerly than usual for her lunchbreak. She’s borrowed Abdu’s camera, and when noon arrives, she heads for the water. Her mission: to photograph the turtles in the resort’s bay. She already had extensive experience with photo-identification from a project she worked on in Australia, and wonders if it can be useful here. Maybe she could create a catalog of the turtles for the resort, she thought, but the end product wasn’t too important. She just wanted to begin.
The first turtle she photographed was Margherita, a juvenile green turtle who came nearly every day to feed in Abu Dabbab’s shallow water. Margherita became the first entry in a list that grew steadily during Micol’s lunchbreaks until she had recorded almost eighty turtles. It was then, searching for what she could do with this information, that she discovered TurtleWatch.
Officially known as TurtleWatch Egypt, the initiative was founded in 2011 by another Italian, Agnese Mancini, in collaboration with the Hurghada Environmental Protection and Conservation Association (HEPCA). Political turmoil in 2013 caused Agnese to leave the country, and TurtleWatch’s operations slowed to a standstill. When Micol came across the initiative in 2016, it had been dormant for several years. Micol got in touch with Agnese, who suggested Micol contribute her photos to TurtleWatch’s database. TurtleWatch already had a system whereby divers and snorkelers could upload turtle sightings (it was the first turtle-oriented citizen science initiative in Egypt, and formed the crux of their work alongside the educational talks Agnese used to deliver). But Micol wanted to do more than that.
Because Agnese was now living abroad, there was no one to conduct TurtleWatch’s field surveys. The two agreed Micol could take over that role instead with Agnese helping as a scientific advisor. With that, Micol began to expand her photoidentification efforts to other bays near Marsa Alam, utilizing weekends as well as lunchbreaks and showing the staff and guests of her resort how they could also contribute sightings.
She was still working in Abu Dabbab where Margherita, the start of it all, remained a familiar face. Micol could not be sure, but she sensed that Margherita recognized her and even approached her underwater, as though making sure Micol would not forget to take her photo.
Then, in 2017, Micol lost her job. The resort underwent new management and decided they could no longer pay foreign salaries. I could not tell, speaking to Micol, if it was despite this hurdle or because of it that she became what she called a “crazy turtle freak.”
With no job, Micol suddenly had more time on her hands but no income. Abdu had quit his job a short while earlier and was working freelance. This left them in a tricky situation, but Micol pressed on with her surveys and photo-ID work and decided to apply for a grant supporting early career conservationists. The sum was a modest £5000, but it allowed TurtleWatch’s work to continue. It even allowed them to resume the long-paused trainings Agnese used to deliver to dive center staff. Abdu, who from the very beginning was photographing turtles at work to aid Micol, helped deliver the trainings in Arabic. The three of them created a new protocol for collecting sightings, with the major difference being that photos were now required. (Back in 2011, hardly anyone had underwater cameras.) With TurtleWatch nearly back in full gear, they formally relaunched the initiative and gave it the new, imaginative name, TurtleWatch Egypt 2.0.
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Back at the office after another day’s survey, Maja is downloading the photos from her GoPro. Located near Marsa Alam’s marina, their office is a spacious, sunny room painted white and azure blue. With the wind rattling against the glass wall there is the feeling that the sea is near, even if out of sight. The office has an airy feel to it, and the mood is light-hearted.
Maja is the project assistant at TurtleWatch. She recently obtained her master’s degree in biological oceanography back home in Poland, and spends the year between here and Iceland, where she works as a whale watching guide. She once wanted to be a vet, she tells me, but in Poland vets must intern at slaughterhouses, and it is easy to see that Maja feels deeply for animals. She brings alfalfa for the neighbor’s horse that is always tied up and gleefully introduces me to the street dog she helped tag. Although Maja studied to be a conservationist, the income from whale watching allows her to keep doing what she does here. This is the pendulum that swings young professionals between conservation and tourism—the pure and the practical.
Maja shows me how the photoidentification process works. Most of the time, they already recognize the turtles they’ve seen underwater. During the surveys, a cultural mix of names is heard: Alice, Arwa, Sofian, Zahra, Żółw (Polish for turtle). But sometimes unfamiliar ones appear, or they might mistake one turtle for another, so photo-IDing is a must.
The best clue, Maja tells me, is behind the eyes. The scales behind the eyes of a turtle form a unique pattern that distinguishes each individual. After downloading the photos, Maja and Micol (and a third colleague, Valeria, who was abroad at the time) go through every turtle they’ve seen that day and compare its left and right profiles against existing profiles from the same site.
Usually a match is made at this stage. If not, they gradually expand the search to include other sites and more candidates, eventually covering thousands of photos arranged in countless folders. If still no match is made, they might register the sighting as a new turtle, but only if they have clear photos of both sides of its face. This happens about ten times a month, including from sightings uploaded to their website by others. Other times, when the photos are too unclear to make a confident match or register a new turtle, the sighting will be entered as “No ID.”
At the time of my visit, thanks to their surveys and the thousands of sightings they’ve received from divers and snorkelers, they had registered 748 turtles from all around Egypt’s Red Sea coast. The majority of these are endangered green sea turtles while the rest are the critically endangered hawksbills (and one loggerhead turtle). Of course, monitoring populations is a fundamental part of any conservation effort, but to better appreciate the significance of TurtleWatch’s work, it has to be viewed within the context of a data-deficient Red Sea. For instance, one of the first questions I posed to TurtleWatch was this: “Is the population of turtles in the Red Sea increasing or decreasing?”
They reply, “We can’t really say for sure.”
Micol and Maja have an aversion to making definitive statements that seemingly unites all scientists faithful to their profession (to the frustration of policymakers, journalists, and anyone else looking for black-and-white answers). But they are right.
Admittedly, my first impulse was to assume that turtle numbers are declining here, just as I assumed they were around the world. But neither of these assumptions are necessarily true. In many parts of the world, turtle populations have been on the rise after reaching historic lows, mostly thanks to conservation efforts.
There is no clear answer for the Red Sea because there is not enough data. It is possible that they are increasing—but if they are instead falling, why and how? And who should do what about it? Without the data, you cannot get the government to care, much less draft coherent policies or conservation plans. Micol hopes that they will soon have enough entries in their database to conduct analysis with some confidence, but until that can happen, they can only continue monitoring.
Nevertheless, being in the water day after day allows Micol to see trends even if she cannot confirm them empirically. She notices the tremendous loss of seagrass after last year’s scorching summer, which will surely affect the turtles that come here to feed. However, she also recognizes that this has happened in the past, and the seagrass does come back (though not always to its previous levels). She knows that as the coast develops from north to south, the deterioration of the reefs moves along with it. This is obvious in Hurghada, and the signs have started to show here too. When it comes to turtles, she knows it is not just the ‘big’ problems of ocean warming and coastal development that are hurting them; it is also the misbehavior and underregulation of the country’s tourism industry.
While back home in Italy in 2019, Micol received the news that Margherita was struck by a speedboat and killed. She saw the picture of Margherita’s cracked carapace, her internal organs made visible by the deep gash. Micol had seen Margherita nearly every day for four years. She was heartbroken. I imagine it was all the more painful because such accidents are exactly what TurtleWatch aims to prevent through their trainings and talks.
Margherita’s death is an especially tragic example, but there’s a whole spectrum of what Micol calls “turtle harassment.” Often it comes with good intentions, like the childlike urge to touch or hug turtles underwater. But even these good intentions can be deadly.
Micol recalls the time a person recorded themselves on social media placing hatchlings in a bucket and transporting them to the water, a journey newborns must make themselves to become strong enough to make it to adulthood.
Part of the problem can be blamed on a lack of awareness, and part of it on a lack of regulations and their enforcement. For instance, there is little control over the number of speedboats allowed into a bay at any one time, making collisions with turtles inevitable. And while turtles are protected under Egyptian law (meaning they should not even be touched), it is hard to imagine punishments being imposed, especially on tourists.
Operating within this sort of vacuum, TurtleWatch was conceived not just to collect data but to protect turtles through education. They regularly reach out to resorts and dive centers to deliver free training events for staff (boat captains, dive guides, managers). They see it as an opportunity for those employed in tourism to learn more about marine turtles and how to protect them. They also organize talks for resort guests, and everyone is encouraged to become part of the project by sending sightings. This is the power of citizen science—it is not just a tool to make people become contributors of data, it is a way to make people care and change their behavior through a common sense of responsibility.
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By 2019, the £5000 of grant money had fizzled out, and a renewed partnership with HEPCA in which they provided transportation for field surveys ran into obstacles. Having to resort to taxis, and still without any salary since losing her job two years back, Micol knew she was fighting a losing battle. She hoped HEPCA’s transportation would be quickly resumed or that some more funding could be secured, but before any of that happened, her visa expired. She was left with no option but to return to Italy.
It was for Abdu that she returned a month later. The uncertainty and stress of the previous few years had exacted a mental toll on her, and she decided to put her engagement with TurtleWatch on hold. She and Abdu opened a restaurant in Marsa Alam which, in addition to Abdu’s freelance work, helped secure an income. But this was just around the time of the pandemic, and tourism took a big hit here as elsewhere. Micol found herself once more pulled to the sea.
There was a noticeable change. Where once the bays might have overflowed with tourists, the pandemic had nearly emptied them. Micol knew these conditions provided a rare opportunity to see how the turtles behaved in a more natural environment. It was also a chance to provide large-scale trainings to dive centers that had become idle or low on business. With these goals, she applied to and received another small grant in 2021. Micol was now pregnant with her first child, Noah, and juggling the restaurant alongside the renewed activities of TurtleWatch. Despite the challenges, she was determined to make things work.
In 2022, after many ups and downs, they received the grant that changed everything. Abdu had met a Swiss couple vacationing in Egypt who were looking to fund conservation efforts through their foundation, Fourgive. Micol was overcome by their generosity. The grant allowed them to commit full-time to TurtleWatch; they began conducting regular, systemized surveys, expanded their training events throughout the entire Egyptian Red Sea coast, created workshops for students and children, and formally registered as an NGO. The grant covered three years of funding and made it possible to hire Maja and Valeria. The restaurant was ultimately sacrificed but Micol was, once again, a full-time crazy turtle freak.
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Early last year, in a routine survey just south of Marsa Alam, the team noticed a green turtle feeding on seagrass in shallow water. They had seen her for the first time three years earlier but never again since. Her name was Milka. Then they noticed something else—something shiny sticking out of her front flipper, almost like a piercing. When they got closer, they saw it was a metal tag reading: RA0070.
Agnese knew that RA meant Saudi Arabia. In 2016, another turtle was found with a tag linked to Saudi Arabia, but their attempts to find out who tagged it only led to dead ends. (One lead was an Australian researcher who sparked a small stir when he thought the tag might have been his, causing the team to name the turtle Aussie.) This time, they had to figure out what was happening.
A search through recently published papers led to protracted email chains and finally, the answer: a team from the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) had tagged Milka in August 2022.
What this meant excited everyone. Milka, who was seen feeding in Egypt as far back as 2020, had crossed about 250km to the other shore of the Red Sea to nest (where she was tagged by KAUST) before returning to Egypt a few months later. This confirmed an understudied migratory behavior which had only recently been established. It also revealed an interesting advantage to photoidentification that merits it a place alongside the more expensive methods of tagging and satellite tracking. With photoidentification, you can see back in time. Though Milka was tagged in 2022, TurtleWatch’s photo database allowed them to look into the past and see her movements. In fact, the oldest photo in TurtleWatch’s database is from 2004, even though the initiative only began seven years later.
Speaking to Micol, I saw it also meant something else. She did not boast about the discovery or the journal paper that resulted from it, but for the first time I could sense pride behind her usual matter-of-fact attitude. TurtleWatch was clearly a personal project for her, and I started to see the NGO in a different light. In a sense, it is a fragile organization. It does not have the resources or robustness of an NGO engaged in conservation and education and contributing meaningfully to both. Since its inception, it has existed through the efforts of a very small group of people actively engaged on the ground, and it has been brought back from the brink of collapse several times. Yet, as far as I could see, it is filling a genuine gap and making an impact wherever it goes.
Maybe it is not fragility at all, but resilience. There are no cumbersome structures weighing down the organization, and no façades of busyness to hide behind. There is only a group of individuals trying to protect the species they care about.
For that reason, conservation becomes not some end to pursue once organizational matters are in order, but the effort which is itself the guiding force. That could be why TurtleWatch feels so real. There are no hollow spaces inside it, the kind of hollow spaces that indicate the structure has outgrown—has outpaced in growing—the work. Everything here is the work itself.
Nevertheless, the challenges ahead are as daunting as those they’ve overcome. There is again the problem of funding. Without money secured for next year, Micol is unsure how much of their operations can continue. They are coming up with ways to become more financially self-sufficient, but that introduces new complications. For Micol, there is also another pressing matter: where to enroll her two-year-old son in school. She wants the best education for him, but that might mean moving away from Marsa Alam—or the Red Sea entirely. I do not ask what the fate of TurtleWatch might be because I know the answer does not matter. All that can be done is to keep going.
