Sea Turtle Nesting Season - Melissa Macksey Mote Marine Laboratory

The first Gulf sea turtle nest discovered Monday morning at Venice Beach (FL) by volunteers with the Mote Marine Laboratory sea turtle program. We speak with Melissa Macksey of Mote about sea turtle nesting season. 

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Gordon Bird here Beyond the News. It's usually about this
time of year that the first sea turtle nests appear
on Florida's Gulf Coast, and Monday, Mote Marine Lab reported
the first nest of the season along the Sarasota County coastline.
Melissa Mexi is senior biologist and data manager of Mot's
Sea Turtle Conservation and Research Program. Welcome to Beyond the News.

Speaker 2 (00:26):
Hi, thank you.

Speaker 1 (00:27):
Tell us about the first nest of the season and
a little bit of information about the volunteers who go
out and find these nests your sea turtle patrol.

Speaker 2 (00:38):
Yeah, so this year is actually our forty fifth year
of doing turtle patrols on South Manateee and Sarasota Counties,
and so we have quite an awesome contingent of volunteers
that go out every morning between April fifteenth and the
end of October to help us conduct these patrols and
look for new sea turtle activities. And we started on

(00:59):
the fifteenth of this year, but today was the first
day that we actually saw crawl, which turned out to
be a nest as well. So that was a really
exciting way to start the morning and start the nesting season.

Speaker 1 (01:10):
Where did you find it? It was on Venice, So
on Venice Beach. Yes, alrighty. Now are we seeing you've
been of course doing this for many years. Are we
seeing improving improving trends in sea turtle populations?

Speaker 2 (01:31):
Yeah, Our local nesting numbers have been generally increasing for
the last probably fifteen or so years. Last year was
our record year for both loggerhead turtles and green turtles
on our beaches, and our overall record as well. We
broke a lot of records last year. We're hoping to
have another good year this year, and so seeing those

(01:54):
you know, nesting numbers increasing and hoping that that means
good things for our local population.

Speaker 1 (02:00):
More sea turtle nests, I assume that there is a
greater possibility of sea turtles trying to make it to
the water and getting disoriented, So it's a good occasion
I would think to kind of go over the basic
tips to help protect these sea turtle populations, one of
which is helping them get to the water safely.

Speaker 2 (02:22):
Yeah, definitely. And like you said, we record nests, and
we also last year had a record number of disorientations,
which are those events where the turtles don't make it
the correct direction because of inland lighting. So we always
want to encourage people to follow the sea turtle ordinances
and keep the beaches turtle friendly, keeping them dark with
lights off or turtle friendly shielded lights to prevent those disorientations,

(02:48):
but also other simple things like keeping chairs off of
the beach, filling in holes, knocking down sand castles, anything
that's not necessarily perceived as natural. We can remove that
from the beach at night and let the turtles have
it for nesting and hatching, and then we can come
back during the day and have fun again.

Speaker 1 (03:07):
And of course that involves also as well people being
cautious when they're out walking on the beach during the
next few weeks.

Speaker 2 (03:16):
Yeah, the turtles primarily nest at night, and so usually
during the day it's not a big deal to be
out on the beach and enjoying it. There are some
species where there's one species that will nest during the day,
and there are some late comers that may still be
on the beach in the morning during the day, but
for the most part they nest at night. So anyone
on the beach at night just be aware of any

(03:39):
sea turtles on the beach both. So at this point
in the season is nesting females, but then it will
transition to being more hatchlings once we get to that
portion of the season late June into July.

Speaker 1 (03:50):
All right, well, the best of success this sea turtle season.
Melissa Maxi, Senior biologist and data manager of most sea
turtle Conservation and Research program of course at Mote Marine
Lab in Sarasota. Thank you very much for joining us
on beyond the news.

Speaker 2 (04:08):
Thank you