Early sea turtle hatchlings get a hand

Students, volunteers go through training on Jekyll Island.

Sometimes you have your plans and the sea turtles have other plans, like the more than a dozen hatchlings near the north point of Jekyll Island discovered Tuesday morning.

Staff and AmeriCorps volunteers with the Jekyll Island research team joined Mark Dodd, coordinator of the state Department of Natural Resources sea turtle program, to provide training to a group of Georgia Southern University students on hand to learn about and understand the sea turtle conservation and management process.

“The species is federally listed (as a threatened species), so the only way you can participate in the program and work with eggs and hatchlings is to go through our DNR training, and then they’re sort of approved to be on our permit — everybody has to be on a permit to be in possession (of eggs) or participate in any conservation activities,” Dodd said.

On the north end sit about 18 nests in one group, which Jekyll Island Park Ranger Breanna Ondich said was a bit of a necessity as a nearby nesting area is highly erosional, something exacerbated by the effects of Hurricane Matthew.

“Once the nest hatches, we wait five days then we dig in, take all the contents out, and then determine the reproductive success of that nest,” Dodd said, though he noted they were addressing the nest in question a day earlier than that. “And the whole point of that, we use that data for a couple different things — one is, we’re building a population model, a demographic model, and one of the basic parameters we have to put in are the number of hatchlings we have each year that we’re putting into the water.

“It’s also important to know the sex ratio of those hatchlings.”

In general, the earlier an egg hatches, the higher chance of it being female. At other places on the island, staff documented other early hatchings.

“No. 2 was at 52 days, I think,” Ondich said. She later added, “No. 2 is in that erosional area north of Glory (Beach) where all those sticks and dead plants are — it’s kind of in where we did one a couple years ago, up in there. So, it gets kind of dry and hot.”

Another nest, No. 9, hatched at 53 days. Depending on the type of sea turtle and environmental conditions, hatching can happen from around 50 days to around 70 days.

“We still don’t know a lot about the incubation environment and how it affects hatchling fitness,” Dodd said.

The eggs in this nest — No. 13 — were not only hatching early, but appeared to be hatching at different enough paces to be significant. Usually, Dodd, said, eggs hatch rather synchronously over about two days. Unhatched eggs from this nest were reburied at approximately the same depth several feet away.

But with the viable hatchlings ready to go, they received a short transport down the beach, where they paddled toward and into the water.

BREANNA ONDICH / JEKYLL ISLAND AUTHORITY A loggerhead sea turtle, after crawling from the Atlantic Ocean onto a Jekyll Island beach, is digging a hole in the soft sand in which she will lay her eggs. Loggerheads are a threatened species.