Sea turtles symbolize endurance, peace and good luck in many cultures. Good luck is exactly what baby sea turtles need when they place their newly hatched flippers in the sand and make their way to the ocean. The journey can be perilous, but NSU has partnered up with the Broward County Sea Turtle Conservation Program (BCSTCP) and the Marine Environmental Education Center (MEEC) at the Carpenter House to help protect sea turtles on their expedition to the ocean.
Sea turtle nesting season runs from March 1 to Oct. 31 in South Florida. During this time a female sea turtle ventures back to the beach where she was hatched to lay her eggs. Once it is time for sea turtle eggs to hatch, they need to dodge predators like birds and crabs, avoid becoming disoriented by bright lights and make it to the ocean.
While nesting season is a beautiful display of life, it can also be very complicated for the turtles. This is where NSU comes in. The university has developed a 30 year partnership with Broward County to run the Broward County Sea Turtle Conservation Program and the Marine Environmental Education Center at the Carpenter House. This partnership has benefited sea turtle conservation, protection, and research efforts.
Derek Burkholder, a research scientist at the Guy Harvey Research Center associated with NSU’s Halmos College of Arts and Sciences, and director of the BCSTCP and MEEC, said that the sea turtle species that most commonly nest in Florida include leatherback, loggerhead, and green sea turtles. Florida is a high-density sea turtle nesting area so there are many protections put in place for the turtles.
“By educating people, they are more aware of things that they can do to help protect sea turtles including turning off their lights and flashlights near the beach at night, picking up their trash, leaving females alone so they can lay their eggs and leaving hatchlings alone so they can hatch naturally,” Burkholder said.
Broward County beaches span about 24 miles, which the BCSTCP observes through daily morning beach surveys looking for evidence of turtle nesting. The teams look for turtle shell marks in the sand. If the team finds a nest, they mark it by creating a perimeter around the nest with wooden sticks and pink tape so that no one disturbs it. The BCSTCP do a lot on their morning surveys, including relocating nests that are too close to the ocean and could potentially be demolished by the waves.
“We know the sea turtles hatch when we see the little babies’ flipper prints on the beach in the morning after they’ve come out at night and moved out towards the water. Three days later we excavate that nest and do a nest inventory which collects data on how successful the nest was, how many eggs there were and how many hatched or not. If there are straggler hatchlings in the nest, we hold them throughout the day and then after dark we release them back into the water as long as they are able to,” Burkholder said.
The organization does public hatchling releases where anyone can come to learn about sea turtles and then after dark they can go to the beach to release any hatchlings that were not able to make it to the ocean in the morning. There is also a 24-hour sea turtle hotline for people to report a sea turtle in distress.
Burkholder said that last year was a good nesting season with around 2,800 nests, and no major storms negatively impacted the nests. It was a record year for leatherback nests with about 78 nests spotted.
Burkholder said that many of the nests hatched well during the 2021 season. And, with a little luck, these hatchings should be back in 20 or 30 years to lay their own eggs.
