Sea Turtle Watching and Turtle Conservation in Tanzania

Four different things are all called turtle watching

On the Tanzanian coast, "seeing turtles" covers four experiences that have very little in common, and a great deal of the confusion around this activity comes from the four being sold under one name.

The first is encountering a wild turtle in the water while snorkelling or diving. This is the most common and the least arranged. The second is watching a female come ashore at night to nest, which is seasonal, rare, and not something that can be scheduled. The third is watching a nest hatch and the hatchlings run for the sea, which is also seasonal and also unscheduled, but does happen where nests are monitored. The fourth is visiting an enclosure holding turtles in a pool or a walled tidal lagoon, paying to feed them and sometimes to swim with them, and this is the one most likely to be described as a sanctuary or a conservation project when it may be neither.

The rest of this guide separates them, because deciding what you actually want to see is most of the work.

The coast and islands sit beside Tanzania's safari country rather than inside it. Turtles belong to a beach week, not to a game drive.

The species on this coast

Green turtles are by far the most commonly seen and the most commonly nesting species in Tanzania. Hawksbills are the second, more associated with reef and less common on the nesting beaches. Both occur around the islands and along the mainland coast.

Olive ridley and loggerhead turtles are recorded in Tanzanian waters but are not what you will encounter on a normal snorkelling trip, and leatherbacks are rare.

Green turtles feed on seagrass, which explains where you find them. A seagrass flat that looks like a dull bottom compared with a reef is exactly the habitat a green turtle is grazing in, and snorkellers who go looking for turtles over coral are often looking in the wrong place.

Nesting and hatching seasons

Sea Sense, the Tanzanian marine conservation organisation that runs the country's nesting monitoring, puts peak green turtle nesting between April and June, with April and May the peak months. Hatching follows roughly two months after nesting, which makes June to September the period when hatchlings emerge.

Two qualifications matter. Nesting and hatching occur outside those peaks as well, so a turtle coming ashore in another month is not remarkable. And the peak is a statistical pattern across a season, not a schedule: no beach hatches on a date, and no trip can be booked against one.

There is also a seasonal collision worth planning around. On the northern coast and islands the long rains run from around March to May, and a number of coastal lodges and operations close for part of that period. The peak nesting months are therefore the months when the coast is least set up to receive visitors, which is one reason the hatching window from June onwards is what most people actually witness. The islands follow the northern circuit's calendar rather than the southern coast's, which is set out in the two rainfall regimes the country runs.

Where turtles nest

Juani Island, off the east coast of Mafia and inside the marine park, is the most important green turtle nesting site in Tanzania. Kigamboni, on the mainland south of Dar es Salaam, is the other of the country's two largest green turtle rookeries. Together they carry the bulk of the national nesting effort.

Beyond those two, Misali Island off Pemba has a recorded nesting history; a survey in 1999 logged fifty-two green turtle nests and fourteen hawksbill nests there. Maziwe, the sandbank island in a marine reserve off Pangani, is a nesting site, as are beaches along the Saadani coast, parts of the Unguja shoreline and stretches of the far southern coast.

Nesting beaches are not visitor attractions and are not signposted, which is deliberate. Where structured access exists at all, it is through the monitoring programmes and the lodges that support them, in season, at night, in small numbers and on the monitors' terms.

Seeing turtles in the water

This is the realistic answer for most visitors, and it is a good one.

Green turtles are seen regularly on seagrass flats and reef edges around Mafia, in the Mnemba conservation area, around Chumbe, off Pemba and on the Dar es Salaam island reefs. They are also seen, less predictably, from almost any snorkelling or dive boat on this coast. The snorkelling and diving guides cover where and how.

Conduct in the water is simple and it is the part most often got wrong. Do not chase. Do not swim above a turtle that is trying to surface, because it has to breathe and you are between it and the air. Do not touch it, ride it or grab the shell. Stay to the side and below the line between the animal and the surface, keep a few metres off, and let it decide. A turtle that keeps grazing while you watch is a turtle that is not being disturbed; a turtle that stops feeding and moves off is telling you something.

The reason this matters more than it seems is that turtles tolerate an enormous amount of harassment before they show it. Their apparent placidity is exactly why people crowd them.

What a real conservation project looks like

Tanzania's turtle conservation is built on community monitoring rather than on facilities, which is why it is largely invisible to visitors.

The model Sea Sense runs works like this. Community conservation officers are recruited and trained in the villages along nesting beaches. Each walks their local beach daily, looking for the tracks and disturbed sand that mark a nest from the night before. Nests are recorded. Where a nest is at risk from predators, poachers or the tide, the officer relocates it carefully to safer sand. Data goes into a national nesting assessment, which is what makes it possible to say anything about whether the population is doing better or worse.

The people doing this are not volunteers on a gap year. Some have been doing it for decades, and the long-serving officers have protected thousands of nests between them. Where a visitor experience exists, it is usually built around accompanying a patrol or being called if a nest hatches during a stay, and it depends entirely on whether a lodge or project in that area supports the work.

Three features distinguish this from the alternatives. The animals are wild and remain wild. The work is monitoring and protection rather than display. And the visitor is incidental to the activity rather than its purpose.

Enclosures, and the test that separates them

At Nungwi, at the northern tip of Unguja, two places hold turtles in walled tidal water and charge visitors to see them, feed them and in some cases swim with them. The better known is the Mnarani Marine Turtles Conservation Pond, a natural tidal pool in the coral rock behind the beach, which by its own account was set up in 1993 by local villagers and conservationists to rehabilitate and study turtles caught in fishing nets. The nearby Baraka lagoon offers a comparable experience.

These places have a genuine rescue history. A working Zanzibar dive operation states publicly that Mnarani has helped it accommodate and rehabilitate turtles it rescued, which is rehabilitation work of the kind that clearly has value. The same operation also states, under its own conservation guidance, that swimming with captive sea turtles is never acceptable.

Both of those can be true at once, and the reason they can is the distinction the visitor needs to make. Rehabilitation is a process with an end: an animal arrives injured or entangled, is treated, and is released. An enclosure attraction is a place where animals live permanently and are displayed. A facility can do the first and also be the second, and the marketing will describe both as conservation.

So here is the test, and it is one question. Do the animals leave?

Ask how many turtles are currently held and how many were released in the last year. Ask how long the longest-resident animals have been there and why they are not releasable. Ask whether hatchlings produced on site are released, and where, and at what age. Ask what happens to a healthy turtle that arrives. A rehabilitation operation can answer all of that with numbers, because it keeps them. A display operation generally cannot, or gives an answer about how well the animals are cared for, which is a different question.

Three further points, stated without a verdict attached. Feeding and handling turtles conditions them to approach people and boats, which is not a useful behaviour in an animal that will be released. Long-term captivity in a shallow, warm, enclosed pool is not the same environment as the sea, whatever the pool is made of. And paying to swim with a captive turtle is an entirely different act from paying to support a nest-monitoring programme, even where both are described in the same language.

This guide does not tell you where to go, ranks nothing, and takes no position on any individual facility. It gives you the question that distinguishes them, and it is fair to ask it before you pay rather than after.

How to behave around a nesting turtle or a hatch

If you are lucky enough to be present for either, the rules are strict and they exist for reasons that are easy to explain.

Light. This is the big one. White light disorientates nesting females and hatchlings badly. Hatchlings find the sea by heading for the brightest horizon, and a torch, a phone screen or a beach bar sends them inland to die. No white torches, no flash photography, no phone screens. Red light only, and as little of it as possible.

Distance and position. Stay behind a nesting female, never in front, and stay still. A turtle disturbed before she starts laying will abandon the attempt and return to the sea, having spent the energy for nothing. Once she is laying she becomes less responsive, and that is when monitors do their work, not before.

Handling. Do not touch a nesting turtle. Do not pick up hatchlings, and do not carry them to the water. The crawl down the beach is not an obstacle to be removed; it is part of how the animal orients itself. Well-meaning assistance is one of the more common ways visitors do harm at a hatch.

Numbers and noise. Small groups, quiet, no crowding around the nest. Follow the monitor's instructions exactly, including when you are told to move back.

Afterwards. Do not post the precise location of an active nest. Poaching of eggs and adults is a real pressure on this coast, and nest locations are deliberately not publicised.

Questions worth asking

This site ranks nobody and recommends nobody. If a trip, lodge or facility is offering turtles, these are the questions that tell you what you are buying.

• Are these wild animals in the sea, or animals held in an enclosure?
• If they are held: how many are there, how many were released last year, and how long have the longest residents been there?
• Is there feeding or handling involved, and by visitors or only by staff?
• Who runs the nest monitoring on this beach, and does what I am paying support it?
• If a hatch happens during my stay, what is the procedure and who decides who attends?
• What is the rule on lights and photography?
• In the water, what is the guide's rule on how close we get?

Common questions about sea turtles in Tanzania