How to help sea turtles

and the top ten things about Mamie!

Aug 16, 2022

Remember how last year Bea told you about finding a freshly dug green sea turtle nest and watching Emerald Isle’s turtle patrol dig for, find, and count the eggs? We were hoping to observe a sea turtle hatch this year—since we were at the beach later than usual, also there during the full moon, and at a beach with many nest sites.

A hatch sighting didn’t happen for us, but we did see a few marked nests on the beach, and we also had a chance to learn more about sea turtles. On our way home from getting ice cream one night, we happened upon a cool talk by the Hilton Head Sea Turtle Patrol. We learned that on Hilton Head, the most common kind of nesting turtle is the Loggerhead, an endangered species scientists and conservationists are working hard to protect. Like their colleagues in North Carolina, the turtle patrol on Hilton Head Island counts the eggs in every nest and cracks one egg for a DNA sample. They do this to better understand who is nesting and how the turtles are related. Female Loggerheads sometimes make four nests in a season, will return each year to the same nest site, and can still lay eggs at ninety years old!

Loggerheads can grow up to three and a half feet and four hundred pounds, so their nesting tracks are wide and noticeable, like this:

Only females return to shore—once the newly-hatched males make their way the ocean, they never return to land.

Loggerhead literally means “large head”—their big heads and necks support powerful jaw muscles that help them bite through hard-shelled creatures like conch, whelks, and horseshoe crabs. Like other sea turtles, loggerheads will also eat jellyfish. (Leatherback turtles only eat jellyfish and other invertebrates, which makes them gelatinovores.)

Here’s a video of a green sea turtle eating a jellyfish:

Know what looks like jellyfish? Plastic bags in water! This is why many beach communities (including Hilton Head) have banned plastic bags at grocery stores and other shops. Turtles can choke on this tasty-looking trash, and the plastic is also toxic to their systems. More than a thousand sea turtles die each year from eating plastic. Scientists estimate that more than half of sea turtles worldwide have some form of plastic in their guts—and this is especially hardest on young, just-hatched turtles. So just say no to plastic bags (and plastic disposables in general).

Another thing that’s bad for just-hatched turtles? Crawling into a hole! So don’t dig a deep hole on the beach, knock down your sandcastles at the end of the day (lots of fun, cousin Charlie will tell you), and fill in every hole you see.

And of course you know that outdoor lights confuse all kinds of migrating and nesting animals, including sea turtles. Loggerheads have far to go—East Coast turtles enter the Gulf Stream current where they’re relatively protected from coastal predators, and Japanese Loggerheads travel all the way to the coast of Mexico to feed and get bigger, swimming as many as 8,000 miles in a single year. Females return to the same beach where they hatched. Scientists aren’t sure exactly how they do it, but they believe that tumbling through their first waves helps to set their internal GPS:

Isn’t it cool that we’re always learning new things about animals, and that they’re always even smarter than we think they are?

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