Turtle nests abound on Lee, Collier county beaches

Written by
Andrea Stetson
Special to news-press.com

The number of turtle nests on beaches in Lee and Collier counties and around the state are shocking even the experts. In many areas there are more than double the number of nests from this time last year and the turtles keep coming ashore laying more eggs.

“We’re thrilled with our nesting numbers,” said Eve Haverfield, president and founder of Turtle Time, a nonprofit group that monitors sea turtles in South Lee County. “We’ve not seen numbers like this, this early. We are seeing this rush of turtles come onshore.”

The loggerhead turtle is on the endangered species list.

Blair Witherington, research scientist for the Fish and Wildlife Research Institute, uses 32 beaches in Florida as index beaches to study trends in nesting.

“Loggerhead nesting this May was double what it was in 2011 and that’s pretty amazing,” Witherington said. We are having large numbers on all the beaches. The nests are up everywhere.”

What else that’s pretty amazing is the reasons are a big mystery.

There are all kinds of theories floating around about why this is happening. Haverfield heard that it is part of an El Nino syndrome, where numbers rise and plummet depending on the El Nino weather patterns.

Maura Kraus, senior environmental specialist for Collier County Department of Natural Resources, said part of it could be due to a turtle program in the 1980s where dozens of hatchlings were raised in captivity and then released when they were older and bigger. But that’s only Kraus’ guess.

“It’s crazy and it is continuing to be crazy,” said Kraus. “I don’t know what is going on.”

Experts also point to the warmer water that sparked an early start to the season. Although turtle nesting season officially began in May, Captiva had its first nest on April 20 followed by a nest on Bonita Beach on April 23. Female turtles typically start nesting when the water temperature hits 80 degrees so the warmer winter and warmer water sparked an early start.

There are already 51 nests on Bonita Beach compared to 21 last year and six in 2010. Fort Myers Beach has 29 nests compared to five last year and three in 2010 and even Big Hickory Island has six nests compared to zero last year and one in 2010.

Even with the big numbers Haverfield doesn’t know how the season will end up.

“Right now, it’s pretty cool,’’ she said.

The same is being said in Collier County. Officials there have never seen this many nests so early in the season.

There are a whopping 517 nests on Collier beaches now. On many beaches the numbers are double and even triple. For example Barefoot Beach has 53 nests compared to 24 last year. Delnor-Wiggins State Park boasts of 21 compared to six last year, Vanderbilt has 93 compared to 29 in 2011 and Parkshore is looking out for 80 nests compared to 27 last year. The list goes on and on with almost every beach in Collier more than doubling in nests.

“All the beaches are like that,” Kraus said. “It’s incredible.”

Sanibel and Captiva are also having an amazing turtle season.

“So far we are having a really great year. I don’t know if that is because we had a really great start,” said Amanda Bryant who monitors turtles for the Sanibel-Captiva Conservation Foundation.

“My fear, a little, is that they had a really good start and they will finish early and it will be an average year.”

Sanibel has 126 nests compared to 79 this time last year and Captiva has 43 nests compared to 38 last year at this time.

“I had to order supplies because we are running out of things like predator control screens and supplies needed for that,” Bryant said. “That’s a problem I enjoy having. I like having more nests. We are off to a really great start.”

This great nesting season isn’t just in Southwest Florida but around the state.

“Manasota Key had more than 700 loggerhead nests and that is mind-boggling,” Bryant said.

That’s about 200 more than last year.

“That kind of increase leads me to think it is more than an early nesting season,” Bryant said.

Haley Rutger, a communications specialist with Mote Marine, said numbers are high on the 35 miles of beach they monitor from Longboat Key to Venice.

“In our patrol area they have been strong this year,” Rutger said.

Two turtles appear to do a ‘high five’ using their flippers, while swimming under water. Report by Emma Clark.

by Christopher Joyce
Click here to see the original article on NPR.org.

On Florida’s Gulf coast Tuesday, there will be a celebrated homecoming. For a turtle. This is no ordinary turtle: Known as Johnny Vasco da Gama, after the 15th-century Portuguese explorer, it crossed the Atlantic twice — by sea and by air.

Johnny, as his human friends call him, is a critically endangered Kemp’s ridley turtle. Only a few thousand of these sea-turtles exist, mostly in the Gulf of Mexico. Normally, they do not migrate across the Atlantic.

But in 2008, a juvenile Kemp’s Ridley washed ashore in Europe — cold, exhausted and 4,600 miles from home. Turtle scientist Tony Tucker reckons the turtle hitched a ride.

“Most little turtles — they’re living in the sargassum rafts,” Tucker says. “The sargassum brown seaweed that floats at the surface provides them shelter from predators like seagulls and albatrosses, but it’s also a rich source of food.”

Tucker, who works with the sea turtle conservation program at the Mote Marine Laboratory in Florida, thinks Johnny and his seaweed raft got caught in a big circular current called the North Atlantic Gyre. The journey would have taken over a year.

Johnny’s rescuers nursed him to health in the Netherlands and then Portugal. But they knew he was a rare species and needed to get home. So they flew him to Florida on a Portuguese airliner.

“They bolted out one of the passenger rows of seats and made a place inside a special container for Johnny, and he got to ride all the way across the Atlantic,” Tucker says. “This jet-setting turtle has already crossed the Atlantic twice now, but once in style.”

Biologists at Mote were ready for him.

“We had prepared a warm tank for him, and he’s been swimming ever since. I think there was probably a bit of travel stress — we could call it jet lag if you will — but Johnny has come out of that very nicely,” Tucker says.

Museum records in Europe and the United Kingdom show that four Kemp’s ridley turtles have made this trip in the last century, but those were just one-way.

On Tuesday, scientists will set Johnny free in the waters of the Gulf of Mexico. This time, he’ll be wearing a satellite tag on his back.

Activist: Another example of the U.S. government folding because of political pressure

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Loggerhead sea turtles along the West Coast will be listed as “endangered” but those on the East Coast won’t, the Obama administration said Friday in a split decision that had environmentalists seeing a mixed message about the threats pushing this ancient species toward extinction.

Populations on both coasts have dropped significantly in recent decades, though Atlantic loggerheads rebounded a bit in recent years. The key threats are getting tangled in fishing nets, accidentally being hooked on fishing lines and loss of nesting habitat.

“While today’s designation gives new hope for North Pacific loggerheads, it leaves the fate of the species in the Atlantic at risk,” Whit Sheard, a lawyer with the conservation group Oceana, said in a statement.

The decision “ignores the massive impacts of the BP oil spill and increasing threats from shrimp-trawl fisheries,” added Chris Pincetich, a biologist with the Turtle Island Restoration Network.

The decision, which followed a four-year petition by Oceana, TIRN and the Center for Biological Diversity, moved North Pacific populations from “threatened” to “endangered” status, while leaving the Northwest Atlantic ones at “threatened” — a status held since 1978.

The groups were also upset that the administration did not propose ways to protect loggerhead habitat. “The government has delayed proposing any critical habitat for loggerhead sea turtles, which is an important step in achieving improved protections for key nesting beaches and migratory and feeding areas in the ocean,” Oceana stated.

Oceana suggested that the Obama administration had caved in to Republican opposition to environmental regulations.

“The government completely dismissed its own scientific conclusions,” said Oceana marine wildlife manager Elizabeth Griffin Wilson. “Listing decisions are legally required to be based entirely on science. This is yet another example of the U.S. government folding because of political pressure.”

South Florida has the largest nesting beaches for loggerheads in the Northwest Atlantic. In the Pacific, loggerheads nest in Japan but spend much of their time along the coasts of Mexico and Southern California.

The Center for Biological Diversity estimates loggerhead populations along the Pacific coast dropped 80 percent over the last decade.

Before a recent rebound, Atlantic populations had declined by almost 40 percent since 1998, the center estimates.

Loggerheads and other sea turtles have benefited from new fishing nets that allow them to escape entanglement, but the fact that those nets are not mandatory means thousands are still killed each year. In the U.S. shrimp trawling industry alone, a recent study found, some 4,600 sea turtles still die each year.

Those new nets were part of the rationale cited for not listing northwest Atlantic turtles as “endangered” — a status that the administration had earlier proposed.

“Some of the fisheries bycatch effects appear to have been resolved through requirement of turtle excluder devices in shrimp trawlers, and longline fishery effort has declined due to fish stock decreases and economic reasons,” the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service said in a statement.

“Substantial conservation efforts are underway to address” other threats, it added.

Loggerheads are one of six species of sea turtles found in the U.S. All are designated as threatened or endangered.