It hatched alone tonight. Nobody is going to show it the way. Tap the turtle to send it toward the water.
It's out past where the water changes color now. Nothing here points home — you're the one setting the pace.
…
Years later, full-grown, it came back. Not to any beach — to this one. Same mark you saw on the hatchling.
That mark on its shell, hatchling to adult — that wasn't decoration. It's how you could tell it was the same turtle.
How does it find the beach it left as an egg?
It reads Earth's magnetic field. Every stretch of coastline has its own faint magnetic signature, and a hatchling loggerhead turtle imprints on the one under its natal beach — once, before it ever leaves. Decades and one slow ocean-wide circuit later, that same signature is still what it's steering toward.
The wandering route you just swam is a representation, not a recording — real turtles circle real ocean gyres for years. The magnetic field itself is invisible; nothing in this game claims to show you what it looks like, because nothing does.
Source: Brothers & Lohmann, Current Biology, 2015 — geomagnetic imprinting and natal homing in loggerhead turtles, confirmed against a 19-year nesting database.