Manjula goes blogging...

Matthew’s recent blog took me back many years to how I got interested in turtles. I had just got my Bachelor’s degree and wasn’t interested in pursuing the next degree. I just wanted to do something fun outside! I had been skin/scuba diving around the pillars of the Pondicherry pier during high school and college as well as helping maintain marine tanks for the fish we caught. So, it sounded perfect when the Madras Crocodile Bank was willing to hire me along with a friend to build marine tanks for them and fill them with fish. We were also required to volunteer for the ongoing crocodile research on temperature sex determination. Soon the tanks were built, some fish caught, and I was deeply involved with croc work - I just loved the challenge of working with crocodiles and began to dream of a career in crocodile biology. Around that time, the Madras Crocodile Bank needed someone to do sea turtle surveys in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands - the islands had not been surveyed in almost a decade and many of the islands had never been surveyed before. So there, a sea turtle project was put into my hands. I had never seen a sea turtle before, I had never really considered working with them (I loved crocs!), I had never traveled that far on my own, I had never been responsible for a project….and there I was, launched into a sea turtle project on some very remote beaches, completely on my own to figure things out and learn about turtles and return with data…well, that was the beginning….