Out of a thousand hatched green sea turtle youngsters, maybe just one or two will survive to become fully mature reproducing adults. It is a sobering realisation as dozens of day-old green sea turtles begin the most fraught passage of what will be a precarious life.

“It’s better for us to treat the turtles as naturally as possible. If the egg hatches, the baby turtle’s instinct is only to think about going to the water,” said Adrian Hepta Poniman, a ranger at Meru Betiri National Park, charged with overseeing the local turtle-hatching programme.

“There are two kind of releases. The first one is for education; the other one is for conservation,” he said. “The education one is for the visitors. It’s very limited. We only give them 10 to 15 turtles in a bucket.

“But for conservation, we could release hundreds of them. So, if this morning there are 500 eggs hatched, we will release all of them at night – all of them,” he said.

Row upon row of carefully signposted artificial nests have been buried into the sand. Rangers carefully supervise the 52- to 60-day incubation process, after which the babies will bury their way out and up.

Indonesia is home to six out of seven species of turtles in the world, but greens are the most common at this site.

Green turtles will continue laying their entire lives, from when they are 25 to 30 years up until their old age; they can live for a century, it is believed. In that time, they will lay thousands of eggs.

“After they lay their eggs for the first time, they will come back again in the next 15 to 20 days to lay another batch of eggs,” Adrian said. “During one season, sea turtles can lay their eggs five to six times.”