Emerging from the darkness, a slimy claw punches through a gooey membrane and stretches towards the light. Thunder rumbles and crackles above the ground.
This isn’t the undead waking from their graves in a horror film’s opening scenes. Actually, it’s one of the most adorable spectacles in nature, captured in Parenthood: the upcoming BBC series about the challenges of raising wildlife’s next generations – in this case, the hatchlings of the giant Amazon River turtle in Guapore, south Brazil.
The tiny turtles have been waiting for exactly the right conditions to break free, Sir David Attenborough’s voiceover tell us. Once it rains, the sand becomes soft enough for the hatchlings to dig themselves out. Too little rain, and the layer of sand above them will be too sun-hardened; too much and they could drown.
“You’re always nervous. You never know what’s going to happen,” series producer Elisabeth Oakham tells BBC Science Focus. “Sitting with my crew, you’re thinking: I hope this is going to work out. As soon as the rain starts or doesn’t start, you start to feel that anxiety. Is it going to be too much?”
The rains came early during the filming of this scene, but the turtles made it out in time. “When you see most of the turtles making it and not too many drowned, and it’s relief – it’s just glorious.”
Despite the dangers of the rain, two million hatchlings successfully clamber – with seemingly awkward determination – towards their mothers, calling to them from the water.
“Sometimes you do wonder how they survive, because they’re running along and falling down and getting stuck,” Oakham says. “One of the funny things is just seeing how incompetent they are.”
Clumsy though it may look, this is actually a highly coordinated manoeuvre. Scientists have been studying the communication between these turtles for over a decade. A 2014 study revealed that the mothers likely call out to their hatchlings to guide them to the water. As far as they are aware, Oakham says, this is the only turtle species that displays post-hatch parental care – with the mothers waiting for their hatchlings to make it safely to the water.
They even think the adorable squeaking in the footage could be hatchlings agreeing to emerge at the same time so that they can help to dig each other out.
“That’s something which we were really excited to be able to show – the new science around turtle communication,” says Oakham. It was because of this research that the filmmakers were able to get underground to film the hatchlings in the first place, she notes.
Parenting problems
Climate change is the biggest threat to the otherwise predictable life cycles of the giant Amazon River turtles.
“As the climate warms the air, the warmer air holds more moisture, and that does two things,” she explains. “One, it dries things out significantly when it holds that moisture. But because there's so much moisture in the air, when it finally does rain, it just comes barrelling down. And for animals that are used to patterns that are a bit more predictable and gentle, it creates massive problems.”
Disastrous floods caused by heavy rainfall used to happen only once in every 20 years, Oakham says. But in two of the last five years, early rains have drowned the majority of the year’s hatchlings.
Before they can escape the sand, the hatchlings must first absorb part of their yolk sac, which takes about three days after breaking through the shell. If they haven't done so before the floods come, they drown. So when the mother turtles decide to lay their eggs, they take a huge gamble on the weather – a guessing game that’s becoming harder to predict.
They tend to do so two to three months ahead of the rainy season, allowing enough time for the sand above the eggs to harden into a protective crust. At this point, the mothers simultaneously leave the river for the sand – the largest gathering of freshwater turtles on the planet, and one of the only times the species is out of the water – and each one lays almost 100 eggs at 1m (3.2ft) below the surface.
“Water is both essential and life-giving, but very dangerous,” says Oakham. “With climate change, that’s becoming more true, and as a result the world becomes less reliable for those parents. That’s something that any parent can relate to: that feeling of the world becoming less predictable, and trying to navigate all of that while being responsible for the life of a young thing.”
This episode, about parents living in freshwater habitats, is the fourth of five episodes in Parenthood. Watch all five episodes of Parenthood on BBC iPlayer from 3 August 2025.
Read more
- This giant turtle has a teeny tiny head. Here’s why
- How do sea turtles remember what beach they were born on?
- Ocean plastics smell like food to turtles
About our expert
Elisabeth Oakham is a producer and director with a passion for environmental storytelling and natural history. Best known for the 5th episode of The Green Planet, 'Human Worlds,' which tells the surprising story of the relationship between plants and humans, she's now excited to tell the stories of animal parents all over the world in BBC's Parenthood.