The handover was signed and the flag changed and the turtles kept coming up the same beaches they'd been using for longer than either government had existed. That was 1947 — the United Kingdom passed administration of the Turtle Islands and the Mangsee Islands over to the Philippines, a cluster of small islands off Tawi-Tawi, now the least populated town in the province.
Green turtles nest there. Still do. A female hauls out at night, digs, lays, covers, goes back down the sand. Whoever is on the beach that night counts her, counts the nest, moves on. The counting has outlasted a lot of paperwork. The turtles were never consulted about which capital was responsible for them, and as far as I can tell it made no difference to where they dug.
Kit, the sand does the deciding for them — green turtle eggs sort out sex by nest temperature, with the tipping point around 29 degrees, warmer giving females. Which means a bit of shade on the beach, or none, changes what comes out of the nest. Nobody's asked about that either.
They sit in the Sulu Sea, Kit, maybe 40 km off the northeast tip of Borneo, closer to Sabah than to anything Philippine. And a tagged female will put a thousand kilometres or more between a nesting beach and her feeding grounds and come back to the same stretch of sand years later, which is better navigation than most of the maps I was issued.