Despite record number of nests on some Collier beaches, fewer sea turtles might hatch

Naples Daily News

A female loggerhead sea turtle lays her eggs around 4 a.m. Thursday, July 20, 2017, on Keewaydin Island. Conservancy of Southwest Florida turtle interns patrol the beach from sundown to sunrise, looking for nesting turtles.

Lodged into her sandy delivery bed, the female sea turtle huffs and sighs in exhaustion. After dragging herself about 50 feet up the beach from the surf in search of a suitable place to lay her eggs, the mother-to-be is spent.

She stops in between pushes and sighs, covered in mosquitoes. Laying her eggs, the sea turtle is a single mother, way out of her element. As elegantly as she glides underwater, her flippers are hardly made for dragging her 200-pound body up the beach or digging an egg chamber in the sand.

Yet, sea turtles have successfully gone through this grueling process 1,449 times this year in Collier County, which means they are fewer than 200 nests behind last year's numbers. Nesting is expected to slow down as the first nests begin to hatch, but beaches like Keewaydin Island are already ahead of last year's number for this date.

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Ivana Lezcano and Michelle Sparks, Conservancy of Southwest Florida turtle interns, wait for a turtle to finish laying her eggs on Thursday, July 20, 2017, on Keewaydin Island. Lezcano and Sparks then found the eggs and placed a cage over the nest to protect it from predators.

Despite Bonita Beach and Keewaydin Island seeing record numbers of nests this year, the Keewaydin nests also have suffered more losses to predators like coyotes and, unexpectedly, wild hogs.

Dave Addison, senior biologist at the Conservancy of Southwest Florida, thinks increased development west of U.S. 41 has pushed feral hogs onto the island. One of the two hogs suspected on the island has been caught, but one still appears to be on the loose.

"They pushed the hogs out of there, and they found their way out west and eventually to Keewaydin Island," Addison said. "It only takes them a couple of minutes to swim across the channel."

Michelle Sparks walks around as she maps out a false crawl from a sea turtle on Wednesday, July 19, 2017, on Keewaydin Island. The sea turtles sometimes crawl onto the beach to nest and get distracted or run into something that then makes them turn around and find a new place to nest.

Some of the nests that should be hatching right now have been pillaged by predators, Addison said.

"Keewaydin is ridiculous," said Maura Kraus, principal environmental specialist at the Collier County Parks and Recreation Department. "Between the hogs and the coyotes, they're having way too many issues this year."

While some beaches like Marco Island and the Naples Pier beach have lost few to no nests to predators, almost half of the 402 nests on Keewaydin have been fully or partially destroyed by coyotes and hogs.

Overall, the island has seen more nests than last year so far.

"But we won't be able to say anything until the last turtles have laid the last eggs, which will be probably sometime in August," Addison said.

Michelle Sparks, right, and Ivana Lezcano rest during the 30 minutes between runs on the beach around 3 in the morning on Thursday, July 20, 2017, on Keewaydin Island.

For now, the sea turtle interns at the Conservancy of Southwest Florida are doing their best to protect the nests from predators. On Keewaydin Island, turtle interns patrol all night to detect freshly laid nests as early as possible and dig trenches around them. They anchor metal cages in the trenches to protect the nests.

Hogs and coyotes still manage to dig around the cages and destroy the nests.

"This is what it looks like when a hog gets to a nest," said Ivana Lezcano, pointing at a metal cage, one side bashed in and pulled out of the sand with brute force.

Ivana Lezcano, left, measures a nesting sea turtle as Michelle Sparks takes down the information on Thursday, July 20, 2017, on Keewaydin Island. As the turtle begins to lay her eggs, she goes into a sort of trance. This is when the interns gather their information.

During their nightly patrols, Conservancy monitors do their best to restore the cages if they believe the nest is not completely lost.

Some highly developed beach areas such as Vanderbilt Beach have also seen record numbers of "false crawls" this year. When sea turtles drag themselves up the beach, only to run into a seawall or beach furniture, they often get deterred and crawl back without laying eggs.

On Vanderbilt Beach, sea turtles have already "false crawled" 278 times this year, compared with 169 times during last year's entire season.

Ivana Lezcano throws the empty shells from a nest into the water after excavating a nest on Wednesday, July 19, 2017, on Keewaydin Island. The interns dispose of the eggshells to prevent possible predators from digging through excavated nests.

The tracks these unsuccessful endeavors leave on the beach help Kraus, with Collier County, and her colleagues better understand what would cause a sea turtle to abandon her efforts, given the taxing nature of each trip.

"You try to figure out what happened; this one doesn't give us any clues," Kraus said, pointing at a set of winding tracks in the sand. The day before, her team found a set of tracks going in circles, with human footprints around them.

Sea turtle fans patrolling the beaches at night, hoping to see a turtle nest or to witness a nest hatch, are inadvertently decreasing the number of sea turtles laying eggs.

"That disturbs them, and that makes them go back into the water," Kraus said. "That's an issue."