It’s Official: Sea Turtles Set Nest Record
Loggerhead sea turtles crawled past a Georgia nesting record last week, passing another milestone in a slow but steady rebound for the state’s primary nesting marine turtle.
According to Georgia Sea Turtle Cooperative reports, the nest count was 4,080 the morning of July 29, and has since topped 4,110. That’s the most since 1989, when nest surveys by the DNR-coordinated group of volunteers, researchers and agency staff expanded to include all barrier island beaches.
DNR’s Jennie Hudson with loggerhead hatchlings crawling to the surf (Mark Dodd/GaDNR)
In the last five summers, the nest record has been broken twice – the previous high was 4,071 in 2022 – and the annual mark of 2,800 nests set in a recovery plan for the federally threatened turtles has been exceeded three times.
Georgia Sea Turtle Program Coordinator Mark Dodd is encouraged by the progress, but knows the restoration of these beloved, big-headed reptiles is far from complete.
“Loggerheads are a long-lived species and don’t reproduce until they’re 30-35 years old,” said Dodd, a senior wildlife biologist with DNR’s Wildlife Conservation Section. “Based on current trends, we predict it will take another 10 years before we reach our recovery goals.”
Loggerheads spend almost their entire life at sea. But from May through mid-summer, adult females – which can be more than 3 feet long and top 300 pounds – drag themselves onto beaches at night to dig holes at the base of sand dunes and lay clutches of about 100 ping-pong ball-sized eggs. Sea Turtle Cooperative members patrol beaches each day at dawn, marking and protecting new nests and inventorying hatched ones.
That work and the use of turtle excluder devices to minimize bycatch by shrimp trawlers – required starting in the late 1980s – have been key to the resurgence of loggerheads.
Training on Little St. Simons Island to inventory hatched sea turtle nests (Mark Dodd/GaDNR)
The region’s population, listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act, has been increasing at about 4 percent annually since the early 1990s. Computer modeling developed by DNR, the University of Georgia and the U.S. Geological Survey indicates that while the population will plateau at current levels for more than a decade – due to low recruitment during the early 2000s (Georgia had a record-low 358 nests in 2004) – if current protections remain in place, loggerhead numbers will begin to grow again.
Dodd said nesting could then reach levels not seen in the state since the 1950s
Top: File photo of a dawn-nesting loggerhead on Ossabaw Island (GaDNR)
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