Odisha's Rushikulya Beach Recorded 6,98,718 Olive Ridley Turtles Laying Eggs in February 2025 and Gahirmatha 6,06,933 in March, With Trawlers Barred Within 20 km of the Nesting Coast for Seven Months a Year

The forest department’s count at the Rushikulya river mouth in Ganjam district, Odisha, was 6,98,718 (698,718) olive ridley turtles laying eggs between 16 and 23 February 2025, the highest the beach has recorded, Down To Earth reported. Ten days after that nesting ended, on 5 March, turtles began coming ashore at the Gahirmatha Marine Sanctuary in Kendrapara district, and Assistant Conservator of Forests Manas Das gave OrissaPOST a total of 6,06,933 (606,933) for the five days to 9 March.

Odisha has three beaches where olive ridleys nest together in these numbers: Gahirmatha, Rushikulya and the mouth of the Devi river. The Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change named all three as the major mass nesting beaches of the Bay of Bengal region in a 2022 release. On 19 May 2025 the Ministry of Defence called the Rushikulya figure a record and credited the Indian Coast Guard’s annual Operation Olivia, a November to May patrol programme.

An arribada is thousands of females coming ashore on the same nights

Arribada is the Spanish word for arrival, the Odisha Review explains. NOAA Fisheries describes it as synchronised mass nesting in which hundreds to thousands of females come ashore together, so densely that later nesters sometimes dig up earlier clutches. The SWOT Report, written by sea turtle scientists, suggests the habit evolved as a defence against predators, because predators cannot eat all the eggs and hatchlings at once.

Few places have it. A preprint by researchers at the Indian Institute of Science, Dakshin Foundation and other institutions, which has not yet been peer reviewed, says arribadas occur mainly on a few beaches in Central America and India. At Gahirmatha, mass nesting was first reported in 1974, according to the SWOT Report. Odisha usually gets one or two arribadas a year between February and April, and both big beaches see them only in the dry season, the preprint says.

That preprint also tests what sets one off. Using about 40 years of weather and nesting records, it found fast southerly winds on more than 60 percent of arribada start dates at the two beaches. Its model picked out 29 of 37 start dates at Gahirmatha and 22 of 25 at Rushikulya in its test data. The authors note that the two beaches are only about 250 km apart and still respond to the cues a little differently.

Gahirmatha, Rushikulya and Devi, beach by beach

Gahirmatha was declared a marine sanctuary in 1997 and covers 1,435 sq km, Down To Earth reported in 2022. Nesting once used a 10 km stretch of mainland beach, until a cyclone in 1989 washed it away and left a 5 km sand spit, the preprint says. The spit later split into islands that change from year to year. In March 2025 about 3 lakh turtles nested on Ekakulanasi island for the first time in 33 years, OrissaPOST reported, and its beach had grown from about 4 km to about 8 km through natural build-up of sand since 2020. Our piece on Odisha’s cyclone record covers the storms that shape this coast.

The highest figure recorded in India is still Gahirmatha’s. Basudev Tripathy, a Zoological Survey of India (ZSI) scientist, cited about 741,000 turtles there in 2001. In March 2022, Divisional Forest Officer J D Pati counted 501,157 females over four days, from 25 to 28 March.

Rushikulya’s nesting beach is about 4 km long, north of the river mouth, and the preprint says mass nesting there was discovered in 1994. The SWOT Report puts its growth this way: 25,000 to 50,000 nests in the 2000s, then more than 200,000 in a single arribada in the 2010s. Counts since then were about 550,317 in late March and early April 2022 and about 637,000 in 2023. The February 2025 nesting ran for three to four days in daylight and spread over about 9 km of beach instead of the usual 5 km, Down To Earth said. OrissaPOST later put the whole 2025 season at about 9 lakh.

The Devi river mouth had mass nesting in the 1980s, and the SWOT Report says none has been recorded there since 1997. A forest ranger told ETV Bharat in March 2026 that laying had started at Rushikulya, Devi Muhana (the Devi mouth) and Gahirmatha. Elsewhere on the coast, the Puri wildlife division, whose ranges are Astaranga, Konark, Puri and Brahmagiri, identified a record 2,577 nests in 2026, up from 1,136 in 2021, OTV reported.

Eggs, fences and hatcheries

NOAA Fisheries gives a typical clutch as about 100 eggs, and OrissaPOST gives 120 to 150. At 100 to 150 each, one clutch from each of the 6,98,718 Rushikulya turtles would be roughly 70 million to 105 million eggs. That is tuput’s arithmetic, not an official figure, and OrissaPOST notes that predators and high tides destroy some eggs. It gives the time to hatching as 45 to 60 days.

At Rushikulya in 2025 the nesting beach was fenced with nets and divided into 50 segments, each with a team of forest staff, volunteers and villagers, who watched for wild dogs, boars, birds and jackals. Where beaches face tourists or animals, eggs are moved instead. By the end of April 2026 the Puri division had collected about 3.25 lakh eggs in 14 temporary hatcheries and released about 87,000 hatchlings, OTV reported.

Who counts and tags the turtles

The ZSI and the Odisha Forest Department’s wildlife wing began a flipper-tagging programme in January 2021. By 27 April 2022 it had tagged 8,450 turtles, which the Ministry of Environment’s release breaks down as 8,252 females, 198 males and 188 mating pairs. ZSI’s director said the work would continue for at least 10 years. About 340 females tagged in 2021 to 2023 came back to Rushikulya in February 2025, Anil Mohapatra of ZSI’s Estuarine Biology Research Centre at Gopalpur told Down To Earth.

The Wildlife Institute of India (WII) tracks turtles by satellite. In March 2025, OTV reported, the forest department and WII resumed satellite tracking at Gahirmatha after a gap of about 15 years, fitting two females with transmitters on 12 and 13 March. The devices weigh under 300 grams and drop off when the turtle moults. The Odisha Review adds that the Wildlife Protection Society of India launched Operation Kachhapa in 1998 with the Odisha Forest Department, WII and the Wildlife Society of Odisha.

The seven-month closure and the turtle excluder device

Odisha closes its coastal sea to trawlers from 1 November to 31 May. The 2025 to 2026 order, as OTV reported it, bars mechanised boats and trawlers within 20 km of the coast, covers the Rushikulya, Dhamra and Devi river mouths, and lets traditional boats under 8.5 metres fish in limited amounts outside the turtle zones. Fishing beyond 20 km is allowed. Gahirmatha has a similar closure, and ETV Bharat reported in March 2026 that an area of 1,437 sq km including Gahirmatha is restricted over the same dates.

The 20 km radius comes from an order of the Central Empowered Committee, which the Supreme Court set up. Its interim order is dated 7 March 2003, and it also requires every trawler to carry a turtle excluder device, or TED, a grid and escape flap in the net that lets turtles out while shrimp stay in, Down To Earth explained. The Orissa High Court had already directed on 14 May 1998 that trawlers use TEDs, the Odisha Review records.

Down To Earth reported in 2024 that the forest department runs 61 onshore and five offshore camps across four wildlife divisions, with five high-speed boats and 13 trawlers, as the Principal Chief Conservator of Forests (Wildlife) described it. The Coast Guard release says its Operation Olivia has flown 1,768 aerial surveillance missions and made 5,387 surface patrol sorties, and detained 366 boats for illegal fishing. It adds that the Coast Guard promotes TEDs among fishing communities and works with NGOs under formal agreements.

How well TEDs are used is a point of dispute. B C Chaudhury, a retired WII scientist, told Down To Earth that TEDs cut turtle capture by 97 percent for about a 2 percent fall in prawn catch, while Srikant Parida of the Paradip Trawler Owners Association said trawlers avoid them because they would cut catches by 50 percent. The Odisha Review reports that of the 252 trawlers seized inside the Gahirmatha sanctuary and the Rushikulya estuary over the five years before 2021, none carried a TED. ETV Bharat reported in March 2026 that the Forest Department had caught about 400 fishermen and seized their trawlers in the preceding four months, and quoted the environmentalist Birja Prasad saying that fishermen were not following the TED rule.

What the status listings say

The IUCN Red List category for the olive ridley is Vulnerable, according to the Convention on Migratory Species and to NOAA Fisheries. The SWOT Report says it was once listed as Endangered, after industrial harvests of the 1960s to the 1980s crashed rookeries, mainly in Mexico, and that most large arribada sites have had stable or rising nest counts over the past two decades. In India all sea turtles are on Schedule I of the Wild Life (Protection) Act, 1972, the Odisha Review says, and the Convention on Migratory Species lists the olive ridley on its Appendix I. Our Sundarbans article notes that UNESCO also records olive ridley nesting grounds in that delta, and the Odisha state profile covers the state’s government, economy and people.

The 2026 season

The 2026 season was smaller. The Odisha forest department called it a skip year at Gahirmatha, OTV reported on 11 May 2026, and Rajnagar Divisional Forest Officer Vardaraj Gaonkar said sporadic nesting had happened at several sites. ETV Bharat reported on 24 May that no synchronised mass nesting had been seen there. The preprint lists six earlier years without an arribada at Gahirmatha between 1978 and 2020: 1988, 1992, 1997, 1998, 2002 and 2014, and says the reasons for such years are still unknown.

At Rushikulya the forest department counted about 2,05,293 turtles in a mass nesting of four days, OTV and OrissaPOST reported. Assistant Conservator of Forests Dibya Ranjan Behera listed a narrower beach, soil erosion across the estuary, a sudden rise in sea surface temperature and the absence of southern wind as the factors that delayed arrival. Records for the two beaches do not always move together. Ranger Manas Das’s figures in ETV Bharat give Gahirmatha 31,115 in 2023 and 66,933 in 2024, while Rushikulya had about 637,000 in 2023 and, OrissaPOST says, a poor season in 2024. The same list gives 4,53,236 for 5 to 8 March 2025, against OrissaPOST’s 6,06,933 for 5 to 9 March, and tuput has not found an official reconciliation of the spans.

Puri DFO Magar Dhannaji Raoso said turtle arrivals on his coast in 2026 were higher than in the past five years, and OTV reported that about 3 lakh hatchlings were expected to be released there by the end of May.