The pacific olive ridley is probably the most abundant of the seven or eight currently recognized species of sea turtles. However they have been consistently neglected until this decade, are frequently misidentified, and are at present the least understood. The olive ridley is widely distributed in circumtropical seas. Mayor nesting beaches identified in the Mexican states of Jalisco, Guerrero, and Oaxaca, the Nicoyan peninsula of Costa Rica , Surinam, Angola, Mozambique,Madras and Orissa, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Pakistan, and the Andaman Islands.
Ridleys appear to prefer coastal areas, but large groups have been seen in the open ocean.
Their behavior were more like bottom dwellers than others and frequented the shallow water between reef and coast line. In fact, very little is known of the habits of all sea turtles away from the nesting beaches where they have been observed and studied the most. Food habits of olive ridleys is not well known. Early reports stated that their diet consisted primarily of vegetation. It seems likely, considering the frequent open ocean observations of ridleys and a few cursory examinations of stomach contents, that fish, mollusks, echinoderms, jellyfish, and especially pelagic crabs are important food items for this turtle.