Nesting season near for Gulf’s sea turtles
Hundreds will emerge to lay eggs over next several months
They’re coming: a mass of female sea turtles aiming to lay eggs on Southwest Florida beaches this summer.
Turtles nest on local beaches here every year, just as they have since this part of the state emerged from the ocean thousands of years ago.
Sea turtle nesting season runs from May 1 through Oct. 31, and hundreds of females will lumber onto local beaches, dig giant holes and deposit thousands of eggs into the sandy shoreline along the Gulf of Mexico.
Compared with their land cousins, sea turtles are enormous, some (like the leatherback) reaching the size of a small car.
Females will nest an average of 4 times this summer
Females return every two to three years to nest on the beach where they hatched, and an average female will nest four times in the course of the summer and early fall.
They first emerged around 110 million years ago, according to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, or FWC, the state agency charged with protected sea turtles and other wildlife.
Bonita Beach is a stronghold for the Lee County area as 151 nests were laid along a two-mile stretch there last year, according to Turtle Time Inc. data.
By comparison, Fort Myers Beach has seven miles of monitored sea turtle habitat and produced 71 nests last year.
Loggerhead sea turtles (Caretta caretta) are the most common nesting turtle here, although green, Kemp’s ridley and leatherbacks have nested on Lee County beaches over the past 15 years, according to FWC records.
Dozens of volunteers and scientists will spend most summer mornings walking local beaches and looking for turtle tracks, which are several feet wide and go from the Gulf of Mexico, up the beach and then back down to the water.
Nests are marked with stakes and yellow line and are protected by state and federal laws.
State and local laws prohibit lighting on homes and signage that can be seen from the beach as the lights can attract hatchlings, which crawl toward light once they hatch.
Hatchlings crawl toward the moon and its reflection on the water, which steers them to the ocean. Onshore lighting that reaches the beach can disrupt this behavior and draw the hatchlings to a home, business or road.
Adult loggerheads grow to 350 pounds
“(Loggerheads) have a reddishbrown shell and (they are) named for (their) large head,” an FWC website reads.
Adult loggerheads grow to 3 feet in length and weigh up to 250 pounds.
Overall, Collier has about 37 miles of monitored beaches to Lee County’s 51 miles, according to FWC records.
Last year Lee County beaches produced 2,910 loggerhead nests and 79 green sea turtle nests, while Collier County posted 2,137 loggerhead nests and 25 green sea turtle nests.
In 2023, there were more than 134,000 loggerhead nests laid across the Sunshine State, with another 204,000 false crawls, according to FWC records.
Just over 77,000 green sea turtle nests were counted last summer, with 1,648 leatherback nests also being tallied.
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