Tourists disrupt nesting of endangered turtles, because tourists suck

Tourists—is there nothing they can’t ruin?

Many tourists may think they are having a great time in the splendid locale of their choice, but really, they are just messing everything up. Among the priceless things tourists have made worse with their touristing are Mount Everest, the entire cities of Venice and Barcelona, the Great Barrier Reef, Machu Picchu and the Taj Mahal. When they’re not setting a metaphorical fire to the world’s treasures, tourists can be seen complaining that their tourist fun is being disrupted by lame Syrian refugees who just want to escape horrific civil wars and won’t even go to the club with them.

So it was not too surprising when the New York Times revealed that tourists have now set their sights on destroying yet another precious part of our planet. This time, it’s the Costa Rican habitat of the endangered olive ridley sea turtle. The population of olive ridley sea turtles has fallen by 50 percent since the 1960s, so they kind of need to reproduce. Tourists, though, had other plans.

From the Times:

The day-trippers swarmed onto the beach to watch one of nature’s most extraordinary sights, hundreds of thousands of olive ridley sea turtles crawling out of the ocean to lay their eggs in the sand.

The turtles did not want the company. Scared off by the thousands of tourists massed along Ostional Beach on Costa Rica’s Pacific Coast, snapping selfies and perching their children on the turtles’ backs, the ancient reptiles simply turned around and retreated into the sea.