Green sea turtle

Where does the green sea turtle live?

Home: Tropical and subtropical oceans worldwide.

In the wild you find it in: Costa Rica, Australia, Mexico, Egypt, Indonesia, United States.

Conservation status from the IUCN: not in danger.

The short profile

Fully grown it measures 1–1.5 m long. It weighs about 135 kilograms. On the menu: plants.

The story behind it

Green sea turtles are the only sea turtle species that is almost entirely herbivorous as an adult, grazing on seagrass meadows and algae, which they help keep healthy and short by constant feeding, much like grazing animals do on land. Females return to nest on the very same beach where they hatched decades earlier, navigating across thousands of kilometres of open ocean using the Earth's magnetic field like an internal compass. A nesting female digs a pit in the sand and lays around 100 eggs at a time, then covers them and returns to the sea, leaving the hatchlings to dig themselves out and race to the water weeks later. After decades of conservation work protecting nesting beaches and reducing accidental capture in fishing nets, the species was reclassified from endangered to least concern in 2025, though some local populations remain at risk.

Find it on the globe

Green sea turtle is there as a tiny animated figure that breathes and looks around. From far away the planet is only a blue ball; detail arrives as you zoom in, and this one appears once you are close enough. Open it on the globe.

It sits at its real coordinates, not near them — the same numbers listed in the facts above. Switch off the layer for this kind of place and it disappears again; the buttons for that are down the right-hand edge.