Sea Turtle Boom ‘Astonished’ Volunteers in Florida With Best Nesting Season on Record

Turtle counting groups have recorded the largest nesting season on the Southwest Florida seashores of Bonita, Vanderbilt, and Naples, in addition to Marco and Keewaydin Islands.

Inexperienced and Loggerhead sea turtles nest everywhere in the seashores of Southwest Florida, and volunteers counting the nests have been left ‘astonished’ and ‘ecstatic,’ and the reptiles’ fecundity this yr.

Collier County, which incorporates all the ocean turtle web site barring Bonita Seaside, registered 55 wanting two-thousand nests, breaking all earlier counting information. This included 609 nests on Keewaydin Island alone, and what’s seemingly an undercount on the nonetheless file breaking 108 nests of Marco Island.

Part of Marco Island was separated by excessive waters throughout the nesting season which prevented volunteers from analyzing all seashores for nests.

“We’ve by no means seen numbers like this,” Principal Environmental Specialist for Collier County Maura Kraus informed the Marco Eagle newspaper. “And they’re hatching actually, rather well. I had some underwater a very long time and so they nonetheless hatched.”

It additionally included a few firsts. Marco Island registered its first ever inexperienced sea turtle nests, and Parkshore Seaside in Collier County even discovered a leatherback turtle nest, the primary within the mainland’s historical past.

Bonita Seaside, simply north of Collier County, discovered 282 nests, breaking its 2019 nesting file of 238.

ALSO FROM THIS YEAR: 500% Growth in Numbers of Eggs Laid By Breeding Inexperienced Sea Turtles

Turtle nests can include as much as 150 eggs, and with volunteers to assist make sure that as many as potential have the possibility to make it to the ocean, it’s an enormous assist to the populations within the Gulf.

Again in 2005, the entire space counted simply 466 nests, worrying biologists.

“We had been actually apprehensive,” Kraus mentioned. “We began on the upward slope round 2016, and we now have had good years ever since, and this yr is breaking information.”

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The volunteers who monitor the nests will mark them with easy wood stakes and warning tape to make sure seashore goers don’t tread on them.

Three days after a nest hatches, volunteers will study it to get a variety of eggs hatched. Any late hatchers might be rescued and launched at nighttime once they have the very best probability of slipping away into the ocean.

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