More on the Sea Turtle Nests

Because the Daytona Beach area is north of where I am, their sea turtle nesting season begins a couple of months later than it does down here. The reason for that is that the ocean water begins to warm down here earlier than it does up to the north of here. Nesting sea turtles prefer warm ocean water. As a result, there were very few nests on the beach up there during the extraordinary high tides last week. That’s the good news.

The bad news is that many of the nests down here where I am were wiped out or made non-viable by the high tides we experienced from the sub-tropical low that later became Andrea. At the time the high tides arrived here, there were approximately 125 leatherback sea turtle nests on our beaches. Forty percent of them are now gone.

The leatherback sea turtles nest here as do the loggerhead and the green sea turtles. The leatherbacks arrive and nest first then along comes the loggerheads, and later the green sea turtles arrive.

The picture you see above is of a female loggerhead sea turtle. I took it last year after she came on the beach, dug her nest, laid her eggs and covered the nest. In the picture she is returning to the ocean after her long “laborious” chore.