Page 71 - Panama City Living Magazine September-October 2019

map and monitor each nest that they have marked. The size and pattern of the tracks in the sand are used to identify species. Female loggerhead turtles reach maturity and lay eggs when they reach an age of about 30 years, and it is believed that all sea turtle species come back to the same general area of the beach they were born on to make their own nest. Turtle hatchlings are believed to imprint on the beach via the earth’s magnetic field. When they reach maturity, they will be able to locate the area again, but any type of interference during hatching might dis- turb the turtle’s imprinting. Just like Panama City Beach, many beaches around the world have drastically changed in the past 30 years. This, combined with the estimate that only one in 10,000 hatchlings will reach maturity, is not a good outlook for the future survival of the species.
In Panama City Beach, research is ongoing. All data from current nests is collected and forwarded to the FWC.
Panama City Beach, with its busy visitor season, has seen 40 to 60 sea turtle nests per year for the past seven years. So far, this season, 45 nests have been located, numbered, and marked, but tropical storm Barry’s storm surge in mid-July caused the flooding of many of these nests. Several nests were washed away entirely and in most cases the flooding impaired the development of the turtle embryos. FWC does not allow nests to be moved in antic- ipation of storms, in part due to the difficulty in predicting when and where high water will occur. According to the FWC, turtles have adapted over the centuries to deal with storms. Sea turtles have a nesting strategy that accommodates for natural events such as Barry.
If the nest develops normally, the eggs take about 60 days to hatch, but incubation times can vary considerably due to fluctu- ating sand temperature which determines the speed of embryonic development and the gender of the developing embryos, warmer temperatures producing more females.
Whether a nest has hatched or not, Turtle Watch volunteers will carefully excavate several feet of the area a few days after it hatched or should have hatched. In late August, close to a dozen volunteers were on-site to excavate nest number 3, a leatherback nest. Leatherbacks are the largest sea turtle species and their nests can be three feet deep. After two hours of hand-digging, the dedicated group finally had to give up as it could not locate the egg chamber, indicating that the nest was likely washed out by tropical storm Barry.
TURTLE WATCH
On the next day, at nest number 15, 123 eggs were excavated by volunteers Nancy Evou and Angela Barros. It produced 120 un- hatched eggs and evidence of only three hatched eggs was found.
Nest number 17 was closely monitored and when the time came and the hatchlings emerged, a team of volunteers was on-site to witness 31 tiny turtles crawl from their nest, only to take off into the opposite direction of the Gulf, disoriented by the lights on the beach and adjacent roadways. All 31 hatchlings were carefully collected and released on a darker beach.
Four days later, on August 25, the same nest was excavated by vol- unteers, who confirmed that 31 eggs had hatched out of the 102 eggs that were in the nest. And to everyone’s delight, there were two eggs that, after being lifted out of the nest, had two hatchlings starting to emerge from their shells. These two would most likely not have survived and been able to crawl from the nest on their own as the majority of their siblings had already taken off. Tur- le watch surveyor Nancy Evou and volunteer JoAnn Weatherford placed the partially emerged hatchlings carefully in a container for a later release into the Gulf.
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