Boring Facts About Green Sea Turtles to Fall Asleep To

In this calm and deliberately boring episode, you'll listen to hundreds of quiet facts about green sea turtles, the large, gentle reptiles that spend almost their whole lives in the ocean, drifting through warm shallow seas and grazing on seagrass and algae. We take a slow and unhurried look at what a green sea turtle actually is and how it lives, since it swims with long flipper-like limbs, holds its breath for hours while resting on the seabed, and must surface to breathe even though it rarely leaves the water. Along the way, we cover the turtle's remarkably long and unhurried life, from the tiny hatchling that scrambles down a moonlit beach to the sea, through the mysterious "lost years" adrift on the currents, to the grown turtle that may travel thousands of kilometers and return to the very beach where it was born to lay its own eggs. There are many overlooked details, including why it is called the green turtle even though its shell is usually brown, how a turtle finds its way across an entire ocean, why these turtles switch from eating small animals as youngsters to eating plants as adults, how the warmth of the sand shapes the young in the nest, and how they can live for many decades in the wild. Nothing here is dramatic, and nothing needs to be remembered. Tonight, as you listen, you can simply rest inside the thought that even the most ordinary subject contains more quiet details than anyone could ever notice at once.