Australasia > Australia > Queensland > Heron Island > Ecology and wildlife > Articles > Nature Rules

Ancient Hindus thought of the world as supported on the back of a giant turtle. As a ponderous Loggerhead turtle scrapes her way up the midnight sands of Queensland's Heron Island, seemingly bearing the weight of the world upon her barnacled back, I can see how the idea arose.

This 200 kg female turtle is labouring back up the very beach that, as a tiny hatchling, she scuttled down some 50 years ago. To watch her is to witness a miracle of natural selection. Against extraordinary odds, she has returned to the place of her birth to lay her own eggs. A handful of us watch the ritual in silence.

Heron is a tiny Barrier Reef coral cay, of only 17 hectares, in the Capricornia Group of islands of Australia's Great Barrier Reef. Access is from the Queensland port of Gladstone (some 75 km away) via a two-hour catamaran ride or a ripping 35 minute helicopter hop. The island is a Marine National Park and supports two "institutions", a University of Queensland Research Station and a small holiday resort.

If there were graffiti on Heron Island it would simply say "Nature Rules". From June to September, migrating humpback whales cruise by, while manta rays and morays glide year-round in its 3700 hectare lagoon. During their own season, up to 70,000 black noddy birds weigh down the island's pisonia trees. Along with another 25,000 muttonbirds (or wedgetailed shearwaters), their piping and cawing din creates an ever-present "white noise" racket that you cannot simply switch off.

However, there is respite in the ocean. We dive straight off the beach and are soon at Heron's famous "Bommie", a 3500 year old, 18 metre high brain coral. Its almost equally famous resident moray eels, "Harry" and "Fang", check us out for visitor's rights.

"Some of the coral canyons here need traffic lights," reports one exuberant diver as hundreds of fish zip by: barramundi, golden trevally, blue damsels and a right royal college of surgeonfish. Corals encrust the reef around us in an endless thesaurus of forms — staghorn, organpipe, gorgonia, lace, brain and slipper, and more. Even in winter the water is a very comfortable 18 degrees Centigrade.

Onshore, there are almost as many fish on the buffet tables, all part of the inclusive tariff. Accommodation (for 280 guests) ranges from luxury suites to budget "lodges". There are full professional diving facilities — courses, boats, dive master, hire shop, refills, etc — as well as plenty to do for non-scuba types. Snorkelling in the lagoon is almost as good as the diving; and if getting wet isn't your thing, a semi-submersible boat, the "Yellow Submarine", provides almost the same view through its below-water observation windows.

But it's always the miracle of the ponderous, returning turtles that draws me back. After dark, during the spawning season —between November and March — Heron's beaches are alive with nocturnal tourists, each of us hoping to spot one of the 1000 Green and Loggerhead turtles that annually drag themselves ashore to excavate huge burrows and lay their eggs.

As though to raise the drama further, from January to April, the tiny turtle hatchlings emerge from the sands. One afternoon on the beach a resident marine biologist explains their survival stakes to us. We're watching some 100 tiny hatchlings — looking like Baby Mutant Ninja Turtles — burst from a dune and scramble, as though on auto-pilot, straight for the sea.

Many of the hatchlings, she says, will never make it beyond the lagoon. Gulls can pluck the infants from the sands; when mature, fishing nets can catch them; and traditional fishermen and diners throughout the tropics have long sought turtles and their eggs as a delicacy. Each hatchling faces odds of thousands to one against its returning, many decades hence, to this beach to complete its own cycle. Even as the marine biologist speaks, we see a small shark cruising beyond the reef, waiting for the first of these hatchlings.

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