They're Heeeeere!

It’s hard to believe but groups around Florida are starting to report hatchling sea turtles on their beaches! The Florida Oceanographic Society shared these awesome photos of tiny loggerheads coming up out of the sand and makin’ tracks down to the water at Bathtub Beach.

As always, if you’re lucky enough to see an emergence of sea turtles in person, do not get this close (these photos were taken by permitted individuals) and let them do their own thing.  It may seem helpful to walk them down to the water, but that natural weeding out that occurs is a necessary thing.

Something that you can do to benefit the hatchlings? Always be sure to fill in the holes from your sand castle building adventures!  (Also tear down any castles before you leave.)   These monuments and pitfalls can become traps and are potentially lethal to hatchlings that are scurrying off the sand in favor the water away from gulls, racoons, and crabs.

Stranded and sick hatchlings (or “washbacks” as they’re termed if they occur after strong storms) can always be reported, the best group I know of for our area is the Sea Turtle Preservation Society.

Where The Turtles Are

SWOT's Award winning green turtle nesting map, Photo: Courtesy of SWOT

I don’t have to look very far during the Florida summer to find sea turtles, they’re quite literally in my backyard. However, coverage of nest sites on the beaches is far less homogenous than one might think.  If you were to start off a beach walk in Jacksonville and round the whole peninsula all the way to Panama City in the Gulf of Mexico-side panhandle, you wouldn’t find an average coverage of nest sites neatly placed every few feet.  While several species nest in the state – notably green, loggerhead, leatherback – not all species will nest in all areas and even across species there are certain key beaches that are high traffic, while a mile north or south has barely any activity at all.

So where are the turtles, and just how do we know where to look for them, year after year?  Luckily, sea turtles tend to be very faithful to their natal beaches.  Volunteers, researchers, and average Joes record the spots and learn their favorites but it takes years to establish a database large enough to convincingly display where a certain species prefers to incubate their little ones.

Imagine then, what an immense, time-consuming, and data-intensive project it must be to launch a world-wide scavenger hunt to find the active nesting beaches for one species, the green (Chelonia mydas).  Oh, and it just happens to have the widest distribution of hatching spots.

That’s exactly the task researchers like Andrew DiMatteo of the State of the World’s Turtles Project (SWOT) and Duke University – along with volunteers, partners, and contributors – have undertaken over the past seven years.   Hundreds of people tracked green turtles through aerial and boat surveys, and even on land by foot or horse hoof.

One of their final products is an elegant world map in GIS format highlighting green turtle nesting traffic.  The map is part of the recently published SWOT Report – The State of the World’s Turtles Vol. 6, and won the International Conservation Mapping Competition.  All the winners were announced in the June issue of Conservation Magazine.

The map highlights three beaches as major sites: Raine Island, Australia, Tortuguero, Costa Rica, and Poilão, Guinea-Bissau. While I’m a bit sad Florida didn’t make the cut, I’m sure we fair better with the loggerhead counts.   (In fact, from their own data, I can report Brevard county alone had 21,242 clutches of loggerhead eggs in 2008!)

Green turtle hatchling in Guyana, Photo: Roderic B Mast / SWOT

SWOT itself is a collaboration of over 550 partners along with Conservation International, the IUCN Marine Turtle Specialist Group (MTSG) and Duke University.   Their website and reports are an enormous resource and well worth taking the time to explore on a Sunday afternoon.  And if you want to go for super-marine-geek level, you can even interact with their full database hosted over on the Duke University servers.

All of this data would not be possible without a breathtakingly collaborative approach to science and thousands of hours of volunteer work.  This is a shining example of the things we as researchers, conservationists, educators, and interested everyday folks, can accomplish when we use our combined talents to synthesize information in ways that make immediate intelligent sense to the public.  (Not to mention highlight areas where conservation measures can make a dramatic positive impact since density of the species is so high.)

No Rear Flippers, No Problem!

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=24350964&server=vimeo.com&show_title=0&show_byline=0&show_portrait=0&color=00adef&fullscreen=1&autoplay=0&loop=0

The wonderful people at the Loggerhead Marinelife Center posted this video over the weekend of a female leatherback sea turtle, nicknamed “Clover”, nesting near Juno Beach. Clover is a known turtle – and easily sighted – because she’s missing both of her rear flippers!

You’ll see little stumps in the video but trust me, her actual flippers would be much larger.  Clover was first sighted by LMC in 2003 with only a portion of a flipper missing.  By 2005 both rear flippers were effected and in 2007 she showed up with no rear flippers!  Judging by the marks and scars across the stumps, and even her front flippers, the LMC crew thinks she’s been tangling with sharks and so far living to tell the tale.

The fact that this female has been able to survive such injuries on her own in the open ocean is really quite the testament to the strength of leatherback immune systems.  I mean.. do  you know how many bacteria and viruses swarm in the average drop of salt water?   It’s not like these guys can swim off to the nearest pharmacy for some Betadine and Neosporin!

If you know much about sea turtles, you know that they make use of those enormous paddle-like flippers to dig out their nest sites in the sand.   It’s crucial that the nests are deep enough to protect the eggs and also generate proper incubation temperatures.

So how do you dig out all that sand if you don’t have rear flippers?! Easy, you get the LMC’s biologist crew to help you. Each time they spot Clover they creep up behind her and help her dig out the nest so that she doesnt crush her eggs. So far this season, Clover has nested SIX times! That’s a lot of ninja-like biologist skills needed to help her little ones have a chance at life.

All of this help for Clover is in addition to monitoring nearly ten miles of beach on the Atlantic.  The season runs roughly May 1st to October 31st, depending a bit on lunar cycles.  At a month in, here’s the LMC’s current nesting totals for the year:

Greens: 9

Leatherbacks: 189

Loggerheads: 1,156

Thank you to the LMC staff for your hard work! You can check them out on their website, and keep in mind they run tours and camps throughout the summer that are not only fascinating and fun, but also help support this nonprofits’ efforts on behalf of wildlife.