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She had turned 15 and sexually mature as she drifted offshore in the waters of the eastern Pacific off the tiny beach we call Ostional.

The afternoon late fall rains had abated for the day and she waited expectantly 300 meters from her destination.

In its final quarter now, the moon was having an unseen effect upon her. A few yards away, another female turtle joined her, then a third, followed by a dozen, then hundreds, thousands, now thousands of pregnant females. For countless ages the moon has graced the earth with its regular but ever-changing phases that affect earth —-and those phases have drawn the young turtle’s ancestors home for millions of years.

Weeks earlier, she and the multitude of sea turtles now waiting beside her were spread across more than 1,000,000 square miles of the Pacific , some more than 2,000 miles away from Costa Rica. Though food was plentiful far out in the Pacific, something she had never felt before had stirred within her. She and thousands of her kind felt the same irresistible pull to come back to Ostional Beach. They were drawn by some unseen command go back to where they had first gone to water.

As she waited in the soft moonlight, she was ready. Over the thousands of miles she had swum she had been bred by several different males in the clear tropical waters because, somehow, they, also, were being affected by something unseen, a force primeval. It was something so compelling that it had been bringing her species back to the same Costa Rica beach since before the first dinosaur appeared on the face of the planet.

We do not know how a Pacific marine turtle finds the precise beach where life began. There are only a few nesting beaches on earth and they are not very large. Indeed, Ostional Beach is just a couple of hundred meters in length.

Now part of Costa Rica’s Ostional National Wildlife Refuge, it is one of the largest remaining olive ridley sea turtle nesting sites on earth.

Wonderfully, in 1995, the year this turtle hatched, some half million olive pacific sea turtles had nested here in massive waves called “arribadas.”

Unfortunately, our sea turtle’s mother will not join her to nest even though for more than two decades years she had regularly nested at Ostional.

She was killed in an illegal shrimping net on her way back to the traditional nesting grounds, an extravagant, needless waste of life since it could have been avoided by the simple use of an internationally mandated, but commonly ignored, law requiring a turtle escape device.

Thousands more were wiped out in what’s euphemistically called “incidental catch” by long line fishermen who refuse to use bigger hooks that would prevent tragedy to this wonderful and ancient creature.

Of course, olive ridleys just offshore know none of this.

They don’t have any idea that they were visiting Ostional long before the first T Rex.

They don’t reaize that human beings are waiting for them to come ashore so that when they lay their eggs on this small wildlife beach, men, women, and kids will legally raid their nests and take 1,000,000 eggs for protecting the rest of the clutches and protecting the species.

They only know that this is where they are supposed to be.

Then, as mysteriously as they first appeared beyond the surf, as silently as they gathered, as patiently as they waited, they begin to come ashore.

One turtle, a second, dozens, hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands—-even more than that—lumber onto the beach and nest.

All night, all day, for days, in a spectacular show of life.

As undying as the moon itself.

Arribada.

Victor Krumm lives in and writes the well-liked and authoritative Costa Rica Vacations website from his home in sunny Escazu, Costa Rica.More ancient than dinosaurs, their ancestors went to sea before there were 7 continents or Seven Seas, the biggest sea turtle of all of them and maybe the most amazing animal on earth, now highly endangered are the leatherback sea turtles.