Over the weekend, a man named Luis Zelaya posted a TikTok video that has since garnered over 3.6 million views.
In it, Zelaya stumbled upon a sea turtle hatchling walking along a sidewalk, next to a manicured lawn.
“Ay dios mio,” Zelaya immediately exclaimed in the video. “Oh my god.”
Then, he picked up the baby turtle, a fraction of the size of the palm of his hand.
“I don’t know how this poor sea turtle got so far from the beach,” Zelaya wrote in the caption, “And before some bird could hurt it, I helped it get back home to the Atlantic Ocean. May God protect it from anything.”
The caption makes viewers hopeful for a happy ending, but watching the turtle journey back to the water was truly miraculous.
Zelaya continued speaking in Spanish throughout the clip, but included translated captions in English.
“How did you get here?” Zelaya whispered to the animal. “We will help you quickly.”
The camera stayed on the turtle, which Zelaya held gently between his thumb and forefinger.
As they walked toward the shore, Zelaya talked reassuringly to the hatchling.
“May God bless you, may you go well,” he prayed over the tiny reptile. “That nothing will happen to you, that no other animal will eat you … that you find a family that loves you.”
And then something amazing happened.
As soon as they reached the sand, the tiny turtle began flapping its flippers, as if it knew it was time to move towards the shore.
“Yay, yay!” Zelaya cheered. “We’re here!”
Then, he gently released the baby turtle onto the sand, giving it a safe distance to direct itself back to the water.
Marine life experts have long studied why sea turtle hatchlings hatch in their nests or are released on sandy beaches further away from the ocean, making them travel a bit of a distance to finally reach the water.
“They need the imprinting on their native beach, so they can determine where to come back to nest, or — depending on the species — near-shore forage, in the future,” marine biologist and southeast representative at Defenders of Wildlife, Katherine Sayler, told Good Good Good.
“That actual physical journey from the nest into the ocean creates an imprinting so that they're able to find it years and decades into the future, which is kind of an amazing feat of nature, but something that they have to do. They have to finish that crawl to find that beach to come back to.”
On the viral video posted by Zelaya, commenters praised his choice to release the baby turtle back into the water “the right way.”
“Thank you for putting her on the sand and making her get to the water herself,” someone commented. “That’s very important for the little baby. You did very well!”
Some also guessed how the turtle ended up so far away from home in the first place. Perhaps a bird had picked up the newborn and dropped it, but another likely scenario is that it was distracted by artificial light after hatching.
Baby sea turtles have an instinctive “sea finding” beahvior, crawling toward the lowest and brightest horizon, usually the ocean reflecting moon and starlight, Sayler explained.
But artificial light sources from development on the beach, or flashlights, can interrupt this process and redirect the turtles from where they need to go.
Regardless of how the baby found its way to a human environment, Zelaya made sure it would have a second chance at life in the deep blue sea.
He cheered it on as it waddled quickly into the surf, chanting “Almost! Almost!”
And once the turtle was swept up in the water, he joyfully exclaimed, “Adios! May God bless you!”
Watch the full video below:
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Featured Image: @zelayalegacy/TikTok
