Our work

The species we are breeding here are Green Turtle (Chelonia Mydas) and the Hawksbill Turtle (Eretmochelys Imbricata). We are collecting the sea turtle eggs from places where they would otherwise be collected to be sold on the markets for consumption for about 2000 Rp. (that is about 0,13 Euros), or be eaten by predators when they hatch, and we put the eggs in our hatchery back into the sand immediately after arrival for breeding. The beaches on Bangka where we collect sea turtle eggs are Bedukang and Air Hantu

After 53 days of breeding time, they hatch (usually at night time) and we put them into sea water in huge buckets. This way we are trying to avoid that the predators eat the hatchlings. Usually predators are eating most of the hatchlings on the beach while they try to reach the sea.

We also have an external hatchery on an uninhabited island (Pulau Dua), where we protect the eggs from predators, and after hatching we bring them to our main hatchery in Sungailiat where we feed some of them until they are grown big enough to be safe at sea, while we release the majority of them already after a few weeks.

The numbers we are breeding varies depending on the season and on the year, but usually we are breeding and releasing more than 2000 sea turtles per year from the main hatchery, and about the same again from the external hatchery. Beside that we have up to 4 adult sea turtles in the marina, who were caught accidentally by fishermen. we feed them with fish and sea grass which we collect at sea, until we release them later on.

We have also created big underwater structures for sea grass to grow, and have sunk them further out at sea, to create new feeding grounds for sea turtles. The original eco system here was and is repeatedly destroyed by the factory like tin mining at sea of big vessels from PT. Timah, digging up to 30m deep into the seabed.

All our funding comes solely from Sian Soegito, the head and founder of Tukik Babel. He also actively pushes the offshore tin mining industry out of this area, to allow the eco system to recover.

Beside actively helping the sea turtle population to survive, we would like you to come and sea the sea turtles, to appreciate these wunderful ancient creatures. And through the awareness about the critical situation of the survival of the sea turtles, we want as many people as possible to enjoy seeing them.

If you can not come, but want to see our work, watch the video we recently made to show the daily work of sea turtle conservation: video

To see a detailed statistic of the hatchery, open the PDF sheet here:
To see information about the use of our funds, open this PDF sheet:

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