With the end of another sea turtle nesting season the volunteers of Save-A-Turtle look back at the long and busy summer on Long Key beach.
The crack team was made up of Cindy Lewis (KML staff scientist on for her 1st official season), Nancy Godshall (Long Key Condo resident and self-proclaimed "Turtle Nazi"), and The Crowders (KML staff scientist Andrew, FWRI's biologist Whitney, and their son Finlee back for his 2nd season).
As you can see below Finlee is well on his way to following in his parents footsteps of tracking the "turtles", which was one of his first words!
The group walked the beach every morning again from mid-April to the end of October and marked a record high 49 crawls with 13 of those being nests. The first nest was laid May 11th and the last couple of nests weren't laid until July 19th and 29th, which is much later than any other previous few years. This was possibly due to the cold weather event the Keys experienced this winter and the sea water temperatures taking longer to warm up.
The nesting to false crawl ratio of 26.5% was the lowest percentage that had been seen in the last 3 years and far behind last year where the ratio was over 40% (11 nests and 16 false crawls).
Of the 1420 eggs that were surveyed by the team 860 loggerhead sea turtles hatched, which is over a 60% success rate. However that was down over 17% from the year before mostly due to 2 nests being over-washed by extremely high tides and one nest being destroyed by raccoons. Above you can see the nests that were affected by the high tides and were inundated with saltwater.
The group was encouraged by such a high number of crawls (only 25 and 27 the two previous years), and looks forward to next season where hopefully there will be even more nests!
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