World Turtle Day: The Turtles You'll Meet This Summer

Every year on 23 May, the diving and conservation world marks World Turtle Day, a moment set aside to celebrate one of the ocean's most recognisable and most vulnerable groups of animals. For UK-based divers, turtles aren't something we see on home dives, but they're very often one of the headline reasons people book an overseas trip in the first place, that first encounter with a turtle gliding past on a reef is a memory that sticks with people for years. With the day falling in late May and summer holidays not far behind, it's the perfect prompt to learn a bit more about the turtles you might meet on your next trip, and to get your summer diving plans locked in before the best dates disappear.

The Turtles You're Most Likely to Meet

Green Turtles

Named for the colour of their body fat rather than their shell, green turtles are among the most commonly encountered species on tropical and subtropical reef dives, from the Red Sea to the Indo-Pacific and the Caribbean. They graze on seagrass and algae, which gives them a genuinely herbivorous diet as adults, and divers often find them resting under coral ledges or being cleaned by small fish at dedicated cleaning stations, a behaviour that makes for some of the calmest, most patient wildlife encounters in diving.

Loggerhead Turtles

Loggerheads are the powerful, big-headed cousins of the green turtle, built with strong jaws designed for crushing hard-shelled prey like crabs and molluscs. They range enormously, and juveniles have even been recorded drifting into UK and European waters on ocean currents, though a genuine sighting on a UK dive remains a rare and memorable event rather than something to plan a trip around. On warmer water expeditions, loggerheads are often seen cruising open sandy areas rather than tucked into reef structure.

Hawksbill Turtles

Instantly recognisable by their narrow, beak-like mouth, hawksbills are reef specialists that feed largely on sponges, a diet almost no other animal can tolerate given how toxic many sponges are. Their beautiful, patterned shell made them a historic target for the tortoiseshell trade, which is a large part of why hawksbills remain critically endangered today despite that trade now being illegal almost everywhere.

Why Turtles Need Our Attention

All seven species of sea turtle face serious pressure, and most are listed as vulnerable, endangered or critically endangered by the IUCN. Plastic ingestion is a huge issue, turtles can mistake floating plastic bags for jellyfish, one of their favourite foods, with often fatal consequences. Bycatch in fishing gear, the same ghost nets and long-lines that plague reefs worldwide, drowns thousands of turtles annually. Coastal development destroys the beaches turtles have returned to for nesting across countless generations, and rising sand temperatures caused by climate change are skewing hatchling sex ratios, since turtle sex is determined by nest temperature rather than genetics.

Diving Responsibly Around Turtles

A turtle encounter is one of the genuine highlights of a reef holiday, but it should always happen on the turtle's terms. Keep a respectful distance and let the turtle continue whatever it was doing when you found it, chasing or crowding a turtle to get a closer photo causes real stress and can interrupt feeding or resting behaviour that matters more to the animal than it does to your camera roll. Never touch or ride a turtle, despite how it might look in old holiday photos, this is harmful to the animal and banned at most reputable dive destinations for good reason. If you want to build genuine turtle and reef conservation knowledge rather than just good etiquette, our Conservation Academy covers this in proper depth.

Start Planning Your Summer Trip Now

World Turtle Day lands at exactly the right point in the calendar to get serious about summer holiday diving plans. The best liveaboards and reef seasons for turtle-rich destinations book up months in advance, particularly for July and August departures, and leaving it until June to start looking often means missing the trips with the best turtle sightings or paying significantly more for what's left. If you're weighing up destinations, our holiday listing and expedition trips are worth a browse now, while there's still good availability and time to sort certifications, kit and any specialty training you might want before you go.

It's also worth thinking about what training would genuinely improve the trip itself. A Peak Performance Buoyancy specialty makes a real difference to how calmly and respectfully you can hover near marine life, and anyone planning a lot of reef diving abroad should think seriously about it well before their flight rather than as an afterthought. Getting your buoyancy dialled in at home, in familiar conditions, is a far better use of training time than trying to fix it for the first time hovering nervously over a fragile reef on holiday.

How Divers and Researchers Track Turtle Populations

Many of the destinations popular with UK divers now run genuine, ongoing turtle monitoring programmes, often relying heavily on citizen science from visiting divers. Photo identification is a particularly powerful tool, the pattern of scales on a turtle's face is as unique as a fingerprint, which means a clear photo taken by an ordinary holiday diver can be matched against a database and used to track an individual turtle's movements and health over years. Some liveaboards and resorts actively encourage guests to submit turtle photos for exactly this reason, turning a holiday encounter into a small but real contribution to conservation science.

Nesting beach protection is the other major front. Volunteers and rangers patrol known nesting beaches through the season, relocating vulnerable nests away from erosion or predation risk, shielding hatchlings from artificial beachfront lighting that can send them wandering inland instead of toward the sea, and recording data on nest success rates that feeds into regional conservation planning. It's a slow, patient kind of work, but it's directly responsible for population recoveries seen at several well-known dive destinations over the past two decades.

Frequently Asked Questions

Will I definitely see turtles on a reef holiday?

Nothing in wildlife diving is guaranteed, but destinations with healthy seagrass beds and cleaning stations offer consistently good odds, and your dive guide will usually know exactly where recent sightings have happened.

Do I need a specialty certification to dive with turtles?

No specific certification is required, but strong buoyancy control and a genuine understanding of respectful wildlife interaction make a real difference to both your experience and the animal's welfare.

What's the best time of year to see turtles on holiday?

This varies a lot by destination and depends on whether you're hoping to see nesting activity, hatchlings or simply resident turtles going about their normal feeding and resting behaviour, so it's worth asking specifically when you enquire about a trip rather than assuming any warm-water destination will be the same year-round.

Is it too early to book if I only decide in June?

You can still find availability booking in June, but the best cabins, the most popular liveaboard itineraries and the widest choice of dates will already be thinning out, which is exactly why starting to look around World Turtle Day rather than waiting gives you meaningfully better options.

Ready to start planning your summer dive trip? Browse our holidays and expeditions, or call the international trips team on +44 (0) 333 038 9090 to talk through your options.