Excerpt Two of Fit for Survival, from Laundry Lines, A Memoir in Stories and Poems

Now they die in the thousands, thrown away as bycatch by the fishing industry and killed for oil, food, leather and jewelry. Developed coastlines eliminate habitat, changing sea temperatures impact hatchling sex ratios and species survival. Polluted oceans destroy the gelatinous zooplankton and other soft-bodied creatures, like salps, that are their food.

In a documentary, I watch the huge female (some grow to 1.8 metres and weigh as much as 680 kg) laboriously drag herself with her front flippers from the tropical ocean's edge to a safe nesting place in the same beach where she herself was hatched — the only time she will ever return to land. Sand flying through the air, she digs a body pit with her front flippers and then a smaller egg chamber with her back flippers where she will lay four to seven egg clutches of 50–90 billiard-ball-sized eggs over a month's time. She covers the nest with sand, packing it down with rear flippers, and then throws more sand around with her front flippers to help disguise the body cavity and nest. After the last clutch is laid she returns to her ocean home, but her telltale trail from nest to ocean is unmistakable.

Hatched en mass after 60 days the babies make a frantic multi-night rush to deep water, feeding on leftover egg yolk. One in a thousand from the hundreds of clutches laid in the sand survives predators from land, air and sea.