Sea turtle nesting season off to promising start in spite of deadly red tide impacts from last year
Chad GillisRachel Barnhart stepped carefully between a patch of sea oats and the tracks of a sea turtle Wednesday while scouting for nests on Bonita Beach.
"Sometime she just crawls and turns around and sometimes she does a nest," Barnhart said while inspecting the beach near public access 8 just after sunrise.
Barnhart is part of a network of sea turtle nesting volunteers who scour local beaches each morning in search of new evidence of sea turtle activity.
They're hoping for a solid nesting season after a particularly nasty red tide killed off hundreds of adults last summer.
"If the vegetation comes up real easy it's probably a nest," said Barnhart, a volunteer for Turtle Time Inc. "They're not all tell-tale. Some are classic and you can just say 'that's a nest.' I'm not sure that this is a nest. We'll call this in because I think it's a nest but I'm not sure."
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Last summer was a heartbreaker for turtle volunteers and nature lovers as millions of pounds of sea life washed up on local beaches. Dolphins, manatees, sea turtles and even a whale shark were found dead on area shorelines during the middle of a red tide that lasted for about 16 months.
"With the red tide we lost a lot of the adult turtles in the area, and unfortunately that occurred when the females were in the area so that may influence the number of nests we see this year," said Turtle Time director Eve Haverfield. "But we’re trying to be optimistic."
Conditions cleared up this spring, and nesting actually started a little early this year.
Barnhart and crew found two crawls that could be nests Wednesday morning, which would make for the sixth and seventh nests on Bonita Beach so far this year.
Sea turtle nesting season runs from May 1 through Oct. 31.
Collier County has seen an early start to the nesting season as well.
"Right now we have 18 nests," said Maura Krause, an environmental specialist with Collier County "We’re hoping for a good year. It started early and it always starts out slow. There will be more females coming to shore as the summer goes on and they’ll nest every two weeks. The same turtle will come and nest again, so around June, the beginning of July is when we see it peaking."
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Nearly 90,000 sea turtles nests were counted on Florida beaches last year, according to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.
Loggerheads are the most common nesting turtle in Southwest Florida.
Last year Lee County accounted for 2,059 loggerhead nests while Collier tallied 1,609 nests, according to the same agency.
Although hundreds of adults died last year, both Haverfield and Krause said the hatchlings likely survived the red tide.
"They don’t stop to eat (after hatching)," Haverfield said. "What killed the adults and the teenage turtles is the fact that they ate contaminated organisms. Hatchlings want to be offshore to the sargassum (seaweed). Then they get swept into the currents and 30 to 50 years later we can look for them."
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