Nesting season is underway!
Between March and October, fleets of female loggerhead turtles emerge from the ocean by night to storm Florida’s beaches. Their mission: laying eggs, about 100 per female. Once deposited, the loggerheads gently cover their eggs with sand and then promptly make their way back to the water, never to see the nest site again.
By day, the beaches are packed with sunbathers, who litter the sand with plastic bags, bottles, and cigarettes. Recreational use is not the only source of debris on the beaches — debris from commercial fisheries and tropical weather systems can be transported by ocean currents and deposited along coastlines.
Each year, volunteers take to the beaches as well, in an effort to restore the nest sites of endangered loggerheads by removing debris. Though negative impacts of the debris on sea turtles are recognized, no study has experimentally tested its effects on their nesting activities.
For three consecutive years during sea turtle nesting season, researchers from the University of Florida visited an area of the Florida Panhandle that is known to have one of the highest nesting densities of loggerhead turtles in the northern Gulf of Mexico.
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The researchers recorded locations of nests and the number of false crawls, which occur when females crawl onto the beach and re-enter the water without digging a nest. Next, they removed debris from certain sections of the beach and repeated their counts.
Remarkably, the researchers reported a 200 percent increase in sea turtle nest numbers on beach sections where debris had been removed. On beach sections that hadn’t been cleaned, the number of nests declined by 46 percent over the same period, which is consistent with recent trends of steep declines in loggerhead nesting in this area.
False crawls unexpectedly increased by 55 percent after the removal of debris, which the authors suggest was because the elimination of large debris close to the water line opened up previously blocked paths to the beach, allowing for more nesting as well as more false crawling.
In an article published in the Journal of Experimental Marine Biology and Ecology, the researchers concluded: “Removal of large debris could be an effective restoration strategy to improve sea turtle nesting.”
With sea turtle nesting season underway in Florida, these findings indicate that volunteers removing debris from beaches will have a substantial impact on nest numbers, giving these endangered loggerheads a fighting chance.
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