I love sea turtles and we often see them in the New Caledonia lagoon, swimming along doing their curiously effective breast stroke. We saw two small turtles just off the beach at low tide as we walked around Ilot Kouare. They were munching on green algae that forms where the fresh-water lens seeps out into the sea. Kouare is also a bird sanctuary and there is abundant fertilizer from their droppings that provide nutrients for algae along the shore. 

You can see one of these small sea turtles just off the beach. We could not get close enough to identify it. It looks suspiciously like a very young leatherback sea turtle (Dermochelys coriacea). These are very rare but have been reported in New Caledonia in the past. Researchers have insisted that leatherbacks do not nest on the beaches of New Caledonia but only last year one was observed laying eggs on Ilot Signal. So maybe...

Sea turtles are not easy to photograph underwater. They are justifiably scared out of their wits when a human approaches.

I did get one nice sphere image of one of New Caledonia's resident sea turtles  in the Ilot Maitre marine reserve but the moment I moved towards this little fellow he (or maybe she) took off at top speed.

Everybody knows sea turtles are endangered after centuries of being hunted and slaughtered when they crawled up on beaches to lay their eggs. Since 1986 the four species of sea turtles that live in New Caledonia have been protected from 1 November until 31 March and it is illegal to destroy nests of marine turtles at any time or to take, keep, or sell their eggs. New Caledonia law also forbids importing, offering for sale, selling, buying or exporting of marine turtles (alive or dead) or of any marine turtle parts or sub-products obtained from them.

In the Northern Provence of Grande Terre, sea turtles are protected all year long, but in the Southern Provence, sea turtles are only safe from November through March and in lagoon island marine reserves - like this reserve at Ilot Kouare.