Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Turtle nests soar, but many eggs don’t hatch
It was a great and terrible year for South Florida sea turtles.
Loggerhead turtles crawled ashore to lay eggs in record numbers, with thousands of the giant reptiles enacting their ancient reproductive ritual along the region’s strip of hotels, condo towers and restaurants. But the nests suffered a catastrophic failure rate, with a high proportion of unhatched eggs remaining buried in the sand.
“We’ve never had a worse
year,” said Kirt Rusenko, marine conservationist at Gumbo Limbo Nature Center in Boca Raton, which protects turtle nests along the city’s five-mile coast. “It was so hot and dry that only 40 percent of eggs hatched, instead of 85-90 percent. The last two years have been very dry and hot and literally cooked the eggs.”
In Broward County, about half the eggs remained unhatched, said Richard WhiteCloud, director of Sea Turtle Oversight Protection, which organizes volunteers to monitor nests.
While loggerhead turtles typically deposit more than 100 eggs per nest, “we’ve had nests where only four turtles came out. Others, none came out .... It’s nice that there’s a trend of more turtles coming to nest, but the low hatch production is a major, major, major problem,” he said.
During nesting season, which runs from March 1 through Oct. 31, loggerhead, green and leatherback turtles crawl onto South Florida beaches. All are protected under the Endangered Species Act.
Katie Purcell, spokeswoman for the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, said the commission plans to look into the possible reasons for the problem.
The high failure rate follows a summer of recordbreaking high temperatures in South Florida and around the United States.
David Godfrey, executive director of the Sea Turtle Conservancy, said it’s unclear how much of a role the hot weather played. Sea turtle eggs are extremely sensitive to heat but there has long been a cycle of occasional bad years for hatchling success.
The nest failures came during an otherwise great year for sea turtles. Broward County saw a record 3,567 nests, the most since the monitoring program began in 1981, said program director Derek Burkholder, a biologist at Nova Southeastern University.
Palm Beach County set a record for loggerhead turtles on the four miles of beach it monitors, with 3,155 nests, or one for every seven feet of beach, said county environmental analyst Kelly Martin.
Statewide, a record 65,807 nests were found along 275 miles of beaches monitored by the wildlife commission.
Loggerheads, by far the most common species, have made Florida their most important nesting area in the world. They are omnivores with an average weight of 275 pounds. Greens, which primarily eat algae and seagrass, reach an average weight of 350 pounds. The largest are leatherbacks, which can reach 1,000 pounds or more and live largely on jellyfish.
The high nest counts reflect decades of conservation work since sea turtles were put on the endangered species list in 1973. State and federal protection measures that went into effect after that include bans on killing sea turtles, restrictions on fishing to reduce their accidental catch and attempts to reduce artificial lighting at beaches.
“Considering the maturity age for turtles is typically between 20 and 30 years old, these might just now be the young turtles from the ’70s and ’80s that we started protecting,” said Stephanie Kedzuf, sea turtle coordinator for Broward County. “It may be a generational thing, with all of these years of conservation now coming to fruition.”