As the sun rises every morning between May 1 and Oct. 31, Habitat Conservation volunteers for the Ponte Vedra Turtle Patrol are on the 42 miles of St. Johns County coastline patrolling for sea turtle nests. Now, after a season of waiting, the rewards are starting to hatch.
The most common type of turtle along the St. Johns County beaches is the loggerhead, and occasionally volunteers will find leatherhead or green turtle nests. All three species are threatened or endangered.
Once loggerhead turtles have reached sexual maturity, generally around age 35, they will mate and female turtles will swim to the beach and lay three to five nests each with approximately 35 pounds of eggs.
Volunteers walk close to the tide line looking for turtle tracks. If the tracks go up the sand and back to the ocean they indicate a false crawl. If they lead to disturbance signs in the dunes, they indicate the possibility of a nest. Once a nest is identified volunteers put up a sign facing north and south so people can see there is a protected nest.
"We try to surround the whole area where we think the eggs are," said volunteer Jane Coady.
Volunteers then return to the nest at night after the turtles’ 55-day gestation period. They dig into it looking for hatchlings. If live hatchlings are found, they are released at dusk from the dunes to crawl into the ocean.
This year 289 nests were found along the 42-mile stretch, which is typical for an average year, said Tara Dodson, Habitat Conservation coordinator.
Still, the 2008 hatching season was rather disappointing because volunteers put in so much time and effort only to have many hatchlings not survive.
"The main concerns we’ve had this year have been … tropical storms and northeast winds." Dodson said.
During Tropical Storm Fay alone, approximately 36 nests were lost. In addition, the sea turtle patrol has been finding many undeveloped eggs.
"We’ve had a number of nests that have just been inundated with floodwaters." Dodson said. "And when this happens over and over again, it prevents the hatchlings from hatching."
Water compacts the sand in the nests and makes it hard for the turtles to get out, said Richard Smith, one of the seven permit holders who keep data and send information about the turtles to Dodson.
"We’ve had 60 to 70 turtles facing the sand ready to get out, but they were dead because they couldn’t get through all of the heavy sand on top of them," Smith said.
The presence of so many thermoclines this year might have also contributed to problems. Thermoclines occur when an area of water changes temperature more rapidly than surrounding areas. Warm water lures the pregnant female turtle onto the sand to lay her eggs. The cold water in thermoclines confuses the turtles, and this leads to an unusually large number of false crawls, said Diane Matthews, Ponte Vedra Turtle Patrol principal permit holder.
Last year, Matthews only tracked 15 to 20 false crawls, but this year there were approximately 40, she said.
"We’d get a couple nests and then we’d get three false crawls," Matthews said. "It was such a bizarre year."
Other problems this year were materials like chairs or things tied down with ropes and left on the beach, and holes dug in the sand by beach-goers.
"Sea turtles cannot crawl backwards, so we don’t like people to leave their chairs or Jet Skis on the beach, because then turtles will get caught in them and be strangled," said Coady.
Sea turtles can easily fall into holes and get stuck.
"The species has been around 140 million years I think, and usually one out of 1,000 turtles will find its way back to nest," Coady said. "That’s a lot of hatchlings, and if only one survives, that’s not great odds."
Rachel Elsea is an applied journalism student at the University of North Florida.
