Pointe Denis, Gabon - After two hours of scouring the beaches of Pongara National Park in the dark night, Joan Ikoun-Ngossa and his patrol finally find a leatherback turtle.
It has just laid its eggs and is struggling awkwardly back to the sea.
For its young, however, there is just a one in a thousand chance of making it to adulthood, thanks to a deadly combination of humans, natural predators, pollution and sometimes sheer bad luck.
With the help of a light -- coloured red, so as not to dazzle or upset the turtle -- Ikoun-Ngossa of Aventures Sans Frontieres (ASF -- Adventures Without Borders) climbs onto the animal to take measurements.
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The whole process takes a little less than two hours It comes in at 1,6 metres long and 1,11 metres wide.
The leatherback is the world's largest species of turtle -- they can live for up to 80 years and reach 2,4 metres in length. However, it is critically endangered.
After measuring the turtle, Ikoun-Ngossa attaches a ring on its back leg to track its progress after it leaves the Gabonese coast.
Clumsy and awkward on land, the turtle disappears in a few strokes once it reaches the water, leaving behind great crawl marks in the sand like the tyre tracks of a four-wheel-drive.
During the two-month egg-laying season, beginning in October, the turtles scramble onto the beach at night, dig a hole, lay their eggs inside and cover them with sand before departing again.
Biggest threat to their survival comes not from predators but from man-made pollution The whole process takes a little less than two hours.
The females lay between 50 and 120 eggs, and one in three is a "dud", with no embryo inside, says Ikoun-Ngossa, a former boatman who now works to protect his country's wildlife.
"The dud eggs are part of the nest. They contribute to regulate the airflow and temperature, and no doubt nature probably intended them as a kind of decoy for predators," he says.
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