A Sea Turtle Conservation Record Three Decades in the Making

Thought Question: If you could leave one thing better for people 30 years from now, what would it be?

“That’s a head. That’s a little baby sea turtle head,” Tyler Hood said near sunset one July evening on Georgia’s Tybee Island. “It just hatched.”

Hood works at the Tybee Island Marine Science Center. She was keeping watch over one of a record 4,292 loggerhead sea turtle nests laid on Georgia beaches this year. In 2004, the state counted just 358, the lowest on record.

Only one hatchling emerged while Hood watched. Rain drove her inside before the “boil,” the moment when most of the more than 100 hatchlings in a typical nest scramble out at once. That’s not unusual. Boils usually happen at night, when beaches are empty. “If you get to see it you’ve seen a really rare thing,” Mark Dodd told The Current. He is Georgia’s sea turtle program coordinator.

Hundreds of volunteers and professionals patrol the Georgia coast nearly every day in summer. They are there to find and protect nests. On Wassaw Island, volunteers with the Caretta Research Project pay to spend a week working the night shift. They tag nesting females. That helps scientists track the turtles.

This year’s record, though, began decades ago. Loggerheads don’t nest until they’re about 30 to 35 years old, according to Dodd. Starting in the late 1980s, shrimp trawlers were required to use turtle excluder devices. They are escape hatches that keep turtles from drowning in their nets. Coastwide nest monitoring began in 1989. The turtles nesting today owe their survival to protections put in place before they were born.

The recovery isn’t finished. The region’s loggerhead population is listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. It has grown about 4% a year since the early 1990s. But fewer young turtles joined the population in the early 2000s. State modeling predicts nesting will level off for more than a decade as a result. Dodd expects it will take another 10 years to reach recovery goals.