Help Turtles Win the Race for Survival

Florida's sea-turtle nesting season began in May, and now that the two and a half month incubation period is over many nests have begin hatching, the tiny turtles making their way to the Gulf - as they have for millenia - aided by the light of the moon. Unfortunately, lights from buildings and streets can disrupt the hatchlings' sea-finding ability. Confused, some of them wander inland and are crushed by vehicles or die from heat exhaustion in the sunlight. After hearing reports about this happening in Bonita Springs, we decided to meet with Turtle Time founder Eve Haverfield to help us remind readers to use the right kind of lighting.

We caught up with Eve Wednesday morning as she and volunteer Shelly Sue Williams were checking on a recently hatched nest near Gulf Street.

"This nest hatched 3 days ago, and we always come check in case some of the turtles get stuck,” she said, digging into the nest. "There are 16 nests left on Ft. Myers Beach that haven't hatched yet, so people still need to be careful with their lights.”

"The way it works is, these guys break out of their shells and slowly scrape the sides of the nest so that the sand falls on top of the shells and makes a ‘floor',” she explained. "That works like an elevator so that the turtles are slowly lifted to the surface. They know to wait until the sand is cold – usually several hours after sunset – then the hatchlings on top stick their noses out and look around for the ocean. If someone leaves bright lights on, they get disoriented.”

Eve told us about the nest in Bonita, where a home had two bright lights facing the beach.

"It had 112 eggs, and all the tracks led away from the water,” she said. "I rescued 17 still in the nest and found four crawling on a street, but the rest were either crushed, eaten or died from exhaustion.”

She told us that this has happened once on our island this year, when 36 turtles from a nest in the Critical Wildlife became disoriented by lights from a condo and a private residence. Only one managed to find its way to the Gulf.

"Even if a light is far away, if it's up to 30 degrees above the horizon and bright enough, they will head towards it,” she said. "Ideally, no one should be able to just turn that switch and sea turtles die, we don't want them to turn lights off, we just want them to have the correct lights in the first place. People can shield their lights, or use amber LED's. The LED lights are still bright enough to provide homeowners with safety, but the turtles don't respond to that light wavelength.”

Eve also said that people should close their drapes after dark, remove all beach furniture (so that turtles don't get stuck) and never shine a flashlight or use flash photography on a sea turtle.

"I wish that real estate agents that manage properties and homeowners who rent their houses out for the summer would make sure that the visitors know about turtles and what lights to use,” she continued. "Nobody wants to have their vacation memories tainted by someone showing up and saying that their lights caused a bunch of baby turtles to perish.”

It's not only the right thing to do, it's the law.

Lee County has an ordinance that prohibits residents from shining lights directly or indirectly toward the beach from May 1 to Oct. 31. Bonita, Fort Myers Beach and Sanibel have municipal ordinances, as well.

Loggerhead sea turtles, an ancient species, are classified as threatened by the federal government. Each summer the females – often weighing several hundred pounds – travel thousands of miles to drag themselves onto the beach where they were born to lay their eggs. Laboriously digging a nest cavity with her rear flippers, she will spend over an hour digging a nest before depositing approximately 100 pliable ping-pong ball sized eggs into the chamber, covering them with sand and returning to the sea.

Once the baby turtles hatch and make their first perilous steps to the water's edge they begin their journey to the Atlantic Ocean. The first days of their lives are spent swimming directly offshore. Once there, the tiny loggerheads crawl into mats of drifting algae called sargassum. They spend the first few years of their lives passively drifting on their oceanic rafts feeding on almost anything they can catch in the sargassum. After a few years, the juvenile loggerheads leave their protective nursery and move to inshore feeding grounds where they spend the rest of their pre-adult lives. Ultimately, at the age of 12 - 30, adult, female, loggerhead sea turtles return to the beach of their birth to lay nests of their own. Very few sea turtles survive to this point. Estimates predict that about one in a thousand hatchlings survive to adulthood.

As the most common of the sea turtles along Florida's coast, the Loggerhead receives special attention in this state, particularly during nesting season. They get help from Turtle Time (began by Eve in 1989), the Florida state-permitted non-profit organization that's been monitoring sea turtle activity from Ft. Myers Beach to the Collier County line.

Anyone finding a nest is asked to leave it undisturbed and alert TurtleTime at 239-481-5566.