Of course, sloths are very dear to the Phantom's heart.
But this post is about sea turtles, not sloths.
Having said that, the David Attenborough clip of the lovelorn sloth hearing the siren song from a female sloth only to arrive and find her already claimed, has cleaved to the Phantom's soul.
But this is a digression.
This post is about sea turtles.
(However, if you haven't seen the sloth thing:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T7HGSvczDA4 )
Meanwhile, back to sea turtles.
How can you not think of the sea turtle without responding to this unlikely, wondrous species?
Their chances of survival are worse than those of the Frenchmen racing across No Man's Land into the maw of the German machine guns at the Battle of the Somme.
In the beginning, the mother turtle finds some beach she has been returning to for years, and she waddles up from the shoreline, digs a little hole in the sand, just deep enough to receive the eggs, and then she scampers back to the sea. She doesn't hang around like some father penguin, or a mother bear protecting her cubs; she gets out of there as soon as she can. There is peril, exposed on the beach. And, unlike the penguin, the mother sea turtle has no father turtle to help with the eggs. She is out of there.
(Really makes the Emperor Penguin fathers look even better in the animal kingdom, when you see the sea turtles. Talk about an absent father.)
Some time later, the hatchlings crawl out of their foxholes and launch themselves toward the ocean. In this charge, they are on their own. Their desperate lunge toward their destination does bring to mind "All Quiet on the Western Front."
The hatchlings set out for the ocean, that is, if they can find the ocean.
How they know where the ocean is, is not clear. There was one story about hatchlings charging not toward the sea, but toward a shoreline Bar & Grill, because it had lights, and the hatchlings, attracted by the lights, or possibly mistaking it for the moon, flopped along desperately toward the bright lights and juke box sounds, only to be crushed on the road by passing Jeeps and SUV's, splattered like so many dropped nachos.
But even when there is no distracting bar, getting from nest to sea is a true gauntlet--flopping along at highest turtle speed, they are picked off by hordes of seagulls, for whom baby sea turtles are a favorite hors d'oeuvres, and somewhere in the neighborhood of 2/3 of them never even make it to the ocean.
And when they do manage to reach the raging surf, some drown! Who would have thought a sea turtle, who lives in the sea, could drown? It's a sea turtle, for crying out loud! But they do. Drown. David Attenborough can be trusted on this, we can be sure.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zE0qp3Yje6Q&t=3s
How many survive whatever predators may be lurking in the ocean is anybody's guest.
But, eventually, some do survive, against the odds, despite the seagulls and tiger sharks, killer whales, plastic bags which strangle them when swallowed, fishing nets and fishing hooks, some actually manage to live and some manage to breed and reproduce.
How exactly turtles copulate the Phantom can only imagine, looking at the anatomy, but apparently, it happens. Is there a Kama Sutra for sea turtles?
But, despite all the mayhem and murderous depredation, some manage to live.
It's inspirational, really.
But it does make one wonder about a benign and loving God.
The Phantom's older son, watching the Planet Earth episode on the spider wasp, which plants its egg inside an unsuspecting spider, which is then consumed, gradually, from the inside by the developing wasp, which emerges eventually, leaving only the husk of the poor wasp behind--the son, seeing this story through to the end announced, "This proves there is no God."
To which, the Phantom objected: No, this proves there is no benevolent, kindly, father protector God with a white beard and mighty halo which lights up the Sistine Chapel.
For some of God's creatures life is indeed nasty, brutish and short.
