Home › Bonita › Banner
A decade of drought
Florida loggerheads — the largest breeding colony on the planet — face an unsure future as nesting numbers plummet
More Banner 
Share and Enjoy 
Dawn spreads across Bonita Beach. Sun rays burst through palm fronds, casting salmon and amber hues on a pile of crumbled sea shells near the tumbling surf. A brown pelican soars over the Gulf of Mexico, pulls its wings close to its body and kamikaze dives on a school of baitfish. Songbird-sized plovers scurry across the beach, running on skinny legs in and out of the frothy surf. There’s a snowy egret feeding in the shallows a couple dozen yards from Angie Ralph, a volunteer with Turtle Time, Inc., a non-profit organization based on Fort Myers Beach that monitors local beaches for research and conservation purposes.
“Even from England, it was always appetizing,” Ralph says while peering over the turquoise waters as though a female sea turtle were about the emerge and nest in front of her. Sea turtle nesting season runs from May 1 through the end of October in Southwest Florida. “Turtle Time was started here, and it’s so popular that it was advertised even in England. So I knew before I got here that I wanted to join the group.”
That was more than nine years ago.
She’s since seen marine turtles the size of tractor tires lumber up on the beach, dig giant holes, lay 100 or more eggs, bury them and then slink back to the Gulf of Mexico in a primitive ritual worthy of a National Geographic cover.
“One morning I got here and there was a very large female still laying eggs,” Ralph says, holding a Styrofoam coffee cup in one hand, a pack of Camel cigarettes and a blue lighter in the other. “It’s absolutely amazing to see these huge creatures come out of the water. They come up and lay their eggs and they’re off again.”
Like Ralph, many of the females nesting on Bonita Beach will have crossed the Atlantic Ocean to get here. Unlike Ralph, though, those females were born here. No matter how many thousands of miles they swim from Bonita Beach, females that hatched here will always return to this same spot to deposit the next generation of loggerheads.
Dozens of volunteers comb Lee County beaches during turtle nesting season. They look for turtle tracks, which look like a single tractor tire print, and signs of nesting. They measure the width of the tracks to get an approximate size for the turtle. Then a GPS unit is used to mark the exact location of the nest. Wooden stakes are then pounded into the sand and the area is marked off with yellow tape, kind of like a small crime scene.
No turtle nests have been found on Bonita Beach. Fort Myers Beach has one, and so does Captiva and Sanibel Island.
Eve Haverfield founded Turtle Time Inc. nearly 20 years ago and is one of the region’s top turtle experts. She collects data from the Turtle Time volunteers and submits it to state and federal agencies to help gauge the sea turtle population and overall health.
They have at least one navigational aid, Haverfield says, maybe more.
“We do know that sea turtles are able to respond to the Earth’s magnetic fields,” she says. “They use the moon and the stars and possibly planetary alignment. They may even have a bio-chemical cue that allows them to smell scent traces on the beach.”
Regardless of how they find their way, sea turtles have nested on local beaches for thousands of years.
Their reproductive practices went relatively undisturbed until the last 100 years or so, when European settlers started changing the coast and the inland waterways that feed south Florida estuaries.
More recently, loggerhead nesting numbers have dropped dramatically in the last decade, Haverfield says. Scientists can’t point to a single or even a handful of factors that have led to the declining numbers, although human activities like commercial fishing and shining urban lights toward nesting beaches could be part of the problem.
Hatchlings emerge about two inches in length and instinctively hurry toward any nearby light source. The same internal mechanism that sends tiny turtles toward the moon rays reflecting off the ocean’s surface misguide them toward man-made lighting.
“We’re concerned about the numbers. The Florida (human) population really started booming 30 to 40 years ago, and the lighting issues were around then,” Haverfield explains. “I remember reading about it when I was still living in Canada in the ‘80s. Thousands and thousands of little sea turtles were being smashed by cars on A1A.”
Female loggerheads sexually mature between the ages of 20 and 50, and can live upwards of 80 years. They’re found worldwide in tropical and subtropical climates and nest in the United States from the southern beaches of North Carolina south to Florida and along the Gulf coast.
Florida is thought to have the largest loggerhead nesting population on the planet.
---
Nesting numbers for Bonita Beach
• 2007: 38 nests producing more than 3,300 hatchlings
• 2006: 44 nests producing more than 4,200 hatchlings
• 2005: 22 nests producing 1,770 hatchlings
• 2004: 81 nests producing 4,387 hatchlings
• 2003: 60 nest producing 5,031 hatchlings
Source: turtletime.org
Tired of being stuck behind that cement mixer? Wondering if you need to buy stock in Bob's Barricades? 
Comments
This site does not necessarily agree with comments posted below. Comments are the sole responsibility of the person posting them. Break our rules, and we will ban you. No exceptions, no second chances. Read our privacy policy & user agreement.
Post your comment
(Requires free registration.)