West Villages Improvement District: Sea turtles aren't slow - With nesting season underway, their numbers break records

Photo provided by Moat
https://www.yoursun.com
August 6, 2019
By BOB MUDGE

Staff Writer

VENICE — More than a dozen local sea turtle nesting records have already been broken barely halfway through the season, which runs from May 1 through Oct. 31.

Actually, broken is an understatement. As of Aug. 4, several have been shattered and a number of firsts have been recorded.

Mote Marine Laboratory & Aquarium’s Sea Turtle Conservation and Research Program staff and volunteers have monitored beaches from Longboat Key to Venice under state permits for 38 years.

The numbers it released Tuesday show the continuance of a recent upswing in turtle nesting and, according to a press statement, likely relate to the breeding cycle of females, who return to their nesting area every two to three years. Similar numbers have been reported south on Manasota Key and Don Pedro Island in Charlotte County and points south in Lee County.

All of the records being broken were set in either 2016 or 2017.

Even with nearly three months to go, the number of nests, the number of turtle encounters and the number of tagged turtles have all set records.

So have the number of nests in the five regions the program monitors. Longboat Key, Siesta Key, Casey Key and Venice have all had record numbers of loggerhead turtle nests, while Longboat and Casey keys set records for green turtle nests and Lido Key reported green turtle nests for the first time.

In addition, each region has also reported the presence of at least two green turtle nests — another first.

Seven green turtles have been satellite-tagged this season, compared to a total of only three from 2007 to 2018.

It’s been a particularly good year for the rarer-to-the-area green sea turtle, with more than twice as many nests recorded this year (170) than in 2017, the previous best year (79). There have been almost three times as many encounters with greens and nearly three times as many have been tagged.

The travels of the green sea turtles with satellite tags can be tracked at Mote.org/seaturtletracking. There’s also a contest accessible through Mote.org to name one of the turtles. It ends Aug. 9.

Casey Key is the preferred nesting spot for the greens, with 128 of the 170 nests recorded. That’s up from 54 in 2017.

There have been two encounters with leatherback turtles and one was tagged — two more firsts.

Altogether, 468 nesting females have received tags this season. Although about 35 miles of beach are patrolled, tagging is done on Casey Key, which gets about 40 percent of the nests in the area.

It begins on April 15, prior to the official start of the season, and involves both flipper tags and transponders similar to a chip for a pet. The data collected enable Mote scientists to track survival rates, return rates and the number of turtles entering the nesting population each year, among other things, according to the statement.

“These kinds of questions contribute to our understanding of the biology and ecology of female turtles, specifically, how aging and environmental conditions affect individual reproductive success, and help inform state and federal policy makers with the best possible data,” it states.

Learn more at mote.org/seaturtles.

Ali H. Johnston, MBA in Real Estate