A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, so goes the saying. In the case of the Olive Ridley turtle known as “03233”, it began with a flap of her flippers. These were no ordinary flippers, but had been tagged in 2021, on the east coast of India. And to the amazement of researchers, the turtle swam all the way to the opposite coast to lay her eggs, which is when her story came to light.

On January 27 this year, under the crescent moon with the tide rising, the local turtle nest managers of Maharashtra’s Mangrove Foundation, Sanjay Bhosle and Shardul Todankar, started out on their routine patrol to look for nesting turtles at the Guhagar beach in Ratnagiri district. Soon they encountered a nesting turtle on the beach. After waiting for her to finish nesting, they approached her to flipper tag—and discovered that someone had already done it. The tag read “03233” and on the underside, it read “ZSI N.A.P.O. KOL-53. IN DIRECTOR@ZSI.GOV.IN”, from which they found that the turtle had been flipper-tagged on the east coast of India, in Odisha, in 2021 by researchers from Zoological Society of India (ZSI).