During my ten-day vacation on Oak Island, NC in the last weeks of August, I was extremely lucky to witness a couple sea turtle nests hatching and several sea turtle nest excavations.
In North Carolina, especially at Oak Island, there is a good system to protect sea turtles (all five species of sea turtles are endangered). Many volunteers wait by the nests each night, waiting for them to hatch. Each morning, there is a patrol of volunteers who drive on the beach from one tip of the island to the other and look for turtle tracks coming up on the beach. The turtle tracks look like bulldozer tracks in a way, I was told, but I've never seen them before. And, at the end of the turtle tracks, near the dunes, there is evidence of a hole that was dug in the sand and covered. This is the turtle nest, and it is then marked and keep track of.
It takes 50-80 days for a turtle nest to hatch. There are between 92 and 192 eggs in each Loggerhead nest, depending on the size of the turtle mother. Loggerhead sea turtles can weigh up to 300 lbs!
Here are some hatchlings coming out! The man has a hand inside the turtle nest because he was excavating it- three days after a nest hatches, or "boils", it is excavated. This means that volunteers dig inside the nest and count the number of hatched eggs, unhatched/dead egg, unhatched but still viable eggs, and pipped eggs. Pipped eggs are those that a baby turtle broke a little, but wasn't able to get out, so it died inside the egg. Really sad! And finally, perhaps there will be several live hatchlings in the nest (as you can see in the photo above), that just hatched later than their siblings and we're still in the nest, trying to come out.
Here's a photo of some egg fragments from turtle eggs that were hatched. Loggerhead sea turtle eggs are the size of ping pong balls, and they are soft and leathery. They aren't hard because of sea turtle eggs had hard shells like chicken eggs, they would crack and break when the mother laid them into the nest.
This are four viable eggs that were found inside an excavated nest. You can see that the egg in the front has a dent in it- this is because the egg is soft.
A closeup of a Loggerhead sea turtle hatchling- isn't it ADORABLE?!!! These hatchling were about 2 inches long- tiny really!
There are five species of sea turtles world wide- Loggerhead, Green, Kemps-Ridley, Leatherback and Hawksbill. The biggest are the Leatherbacks, I think that they can be 8-10 feet in length. They are also the only sea turtle with a soft shell, it feels like leather- hence their name: "Leatherback".
On Oak Isalnd, there are only Loggerhead nests, but the volunteers told me that they keep hoping for a Green Turtle or a Leatherback. Sea turtles come back to an area of approximately a 25 mile radius within the beach where they were hatched, to lay their eggs.
After the turtle hatchling has made his way to the water, he swims hard straight out into the ocean for two days. Then he reaches the Sargassum Sea- a region of Atlantic Ocean that is covered with a thick layer of Sargasso seaweed and lives there for several years until it reaches adulthood.
The survival rate do sea turtles is terrible- only about 1 out of 1000 babies survives until adulthood. Even when they are still inside their eggs in the nest, hatchlings are threatened by crabs, foxes and raccoons who did up the nests and eat the eggs.
The volunteers I talked with came up with an interesting idea to keep crabs from getting into the nests: they would put a chicken bone in the dunes near the nest so that the crabs would take the bone and work on eating it for many days instead of trying to get to the eggs.
We also witnessed a night hatching- during the dark. As you can see, the hatchlings are shined upon with red light so as not to distract them. White light is not allowed near nests that are hatching because he baby turtles might mistake the light for the moon and follow it. The sea turtles follow the light of the moon toward the ocean. That's why, only red light can be used near the nests. Unless you are the volunteer with the huge flashlight who gets to be the moon and shines their flashlight so that the baby turtles can follow it towards the water
However, I met one group of volunteers who used absolutely zero light during their hatching because they wanted to make the hatching as natural as possible- meaning as if the turtles were alone and had no humans to help them.
When I was standing next to the water, and the hatchlings were rushing down towards the waves, one of the hatchling crawled over my foot. I was delighted- blessed by turtle you might say!
Another point I want to add before ending this post is that the volunteers in charge of each nest count the number of hatchlings hat come out of it. They record this and then this is added to some database about the amount of turtles hatched!
And finally, people have asked me how to see a sea turtle nest hatching. There really is no advice- you just have to be lucky. Me, I went to the beach and saw that there was a nest that was supposed to hatch "any day now" 50 feet downy eh beach. I stayed for several hours and was able to see one of natures amazing miracles! So if you want to see a sea turtle nest hatch, you just have to find a nest that is supposed to hatch and then come to the nest around 7 pm and wait for a few hours- maybe you'll get lucky!
Well, see ya later,
Lava of Ocean Dawn :D
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