ENGLEWOOD — With sea turtles starting to nest on local beaches, boaters need to be especially careful in the Gulf.
An adult loggerhead sea turtle washed up Thursday with its shell cracked and broken from a boat propeller. Carol McCoy, a Coastal Wildlife Club volunteer, said she knows of 11 sea turtles that have washed up on local shorelines.
Someone had fun digging this deep hole on the Gulf beach of Manasota Key in this July 2020 photo, but it can be a death trap for the sea turtle hatchlings emerging from their nests. People should fill in holes and flatten sand castles now that sea turtle nests are hatching.
Officially, the sea turtle nesting season began May 1 and extends to Oct. 31. And throughout the season, both female and male turtles congregate offshore while females lumber onto beaches and lay their nests.
"Ease up on the throttle," said McCoy, who believes most boaters would not want to injure sea turtles or manatees.
Since the beginning of the year, Florida Sea Turtle Stranding and Salvage Network has received reports on 370 sea stranded sea turtles statewide, which is more than the five-year average of strandings.
CWC volunteer patrol member Dorothy Johns discovered — and filled in — a very deep hole on Manasota Key in this May 20, 2020 file photo.
South of Stump Pass, on Knight and Don Pedro islands, Brenda Bossman is the state's primary permit holder. She said she's recorded four turtle nests and four false crawls, which is when a sea turtle starts to come ashore but turns around without laying her eggs.
"They're at least thinking about (nesting)," Bossman said.
She and other sea turtle nesting volunteers understand the fun people have digging holes or building sand castles on a beach.
Pam Lundeen, a Coastal Wildlife Club sea turtle patrol volunteer, is 5 feet, 6 inches tall. She stands in the center of a huge "sand spa" dug on Manasota Key in 2014. Deep holes dug and left on Gulf beaches can prove a threat to nesting sea turtles, hatchlings and people walking the beach at night.
But like beach chairs and other furniture left on a beach, holes can be obstacles or traps for the nesting turtles and even more deadly for the hatchlings when they emerge from their nests and scramble down the beach, into the Gulf.
Several years ago, on Florida's northeast coast, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission received a report of a nesting sea turtle that crawled onto a beach, fell into a hole, broke its neck and died.
May 10, 2021 at 12:30AM
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