June 6, 2025
Happy Friday Turtle Friends!!
Today I’m going to tell you about loggerheads, the most common turtle to nest on Sanibel and Florida as a whole. Florida actually is the biggest nesting beach for loggerheads in the whole world, how cool?! Loggerheads are named after their huge heads that have extremely powerful jaws, used for crushing their prey that often consists of hard shelled invertebrates. Some of these hard shelled prey items consist of whelks, conchs, crabs urchins, and horseshoe crabs. These turtles can be observed between 2.4 and 3.5 feet and can weigh between 155 to 412 pounds, with the average adult being 3 feet and weighing about 275 pounds. Female loggerheads nest about every 2-3 years and during one season, can lay 4-7 nests, with a range of about 14 days between each nest. Nests can have a range of clutch sizes between 80-120 eggs per nest. Like all sea turtles, the sex of the hatchlings are determined by the temperature of the sand (hot chicks cool dudes) with Florida producing more female hatchlings than males due to high sand temperatures. There are many threats that adult loggerheads face including white lights that lead to disorientations when nesting, beach furniture and large holes on the beach that they can get stuck in, boat strikes, change in environmental conditions and habitat, and shark predators. As I’ve mentioned in some previous emails, the nests and hatchlings are vulnerable to predators, like the coyotes in Sanibel (everything is coming full circle, remember my email about our use of cages ), as well as white light which leads them to disorient even more than the nesting females. To finish this off, some ways that you can help sea turtles is use redlights at night to prevent disorientations, make sure you fill in all holes on the beach and bring in all beach furniture to prevent them from getting stuck while nesting.
Since my last update there have been 4 new nests, bringing the current total to 11 nests! For our surveys, Sanibel Island is split into 3 sections. Chateaux Sur Mer is part of the west end section of our survey, which goes from Tarpon Bay until about the end of Bowman’s Beach. The west end currently has 138 nests, including the nests in your section, for a total of 239 nests on the whole island; Captiva has 74 nests. I also have to shout out the 3 new turtle mommas that have been identified by our night team on your beach in the last two weeks. Sportulla was first spotted in 2016 from the shell year, French Silk from 2018’s ice cream year, and Mars from this year’s space theme! This makes a total of 6 turtles encountered on the beach of Chateaux Sur Mer since our nighttime tagging has begun. If you have any suggestions for space themed turtle names please feel free to send me an email!
Unnamed jpg shows Mars body pitting in the sand. This is the beginning of the nesting process, where they remove the top, loose layer of sand, so they can dig an egg chamber that will not collapse in on itself.
Unnamed jpg 1 is Mars returning to the water after nesting.
Unnamed jpg 2 is a loggerhead hatchling that I encountered last nesting season on Don Pedro Island State Park.
Stay tuned for my next update! Have a great weekend! Lizzy
May 23, 2025
Happy Friday Turtle Friends!
Another two weeks of turtling has gone by and we have some updates. As of May 1st, our nighttime tagging team, Savannah and the night interns Megan and Taylor, have started doing their surveys. They begin shortly after it gets dark and all night they patrol back and forth from the lighthouse to the end of Bowman’s Beach, looking for nesting females. When they come across a nesting female, they wait for her to finish nesting, then they take size measurements, scan her for identification tags, and give her a name based on the theme of the year. Previous themes have included fruit, ice cream flavors, and types of shells, with the theme this year being ….. SPACE. YAY! In the event that there are no tags, they will tag her for identification purposes. SCCF uses two types of tags, an internal Passive Integrated Transponder (PIT) and an external flipper tag. An easy way to understand the difference between these tags would be to think about what we would use to identify our dogs and cats. A PIT tag is similar to a microchip and could only be found using a PIT scanner, similarly to how a pet microchip can only be detected by a veterinarian. As the name suggests, external tags are located outside the body, which can be viewed by anyone. These tags are used for many reasons: they identify the individual turtle, and allow us to track both her nesting behavior and her movement patterns. Since the programs began in 2016, and since then SCCF has tagged about 1,200 individual mommy turtles! How cool?! Many of them come back years later (typically every 2-3 years) and are reidentified; Cotton Candy is the first turtle that the night team has encountered this season, and she was found on your beach!! She was first tagged in 2017, returned in 2021 and now again in 2025! We must be doing something right over here for her to have returned for 3 nesting seasons; let's keep up the good work of turning off our white lights after 9pm, filling in holes on the beach, and keeping our dogs on leashes.
Things are heating up at Chateaux Sur Mer!! From 2 nests two weeks ago, you are now up to 7! Woo hoo! Since we are on the subject of the turtle tagging project; allow me to introduce you to the mommas who visited your beach in the past two weeks. Lemon Creme who was first spotted in 2017 and Taco who was first spotted in 2018, are the two lovely ladies who nested on Chateaux Sur Mer's beach. Lemon Creme and Cotton Candy are from the ice cream themed year of 2017, and Taco is from the spices / seasonings theme of 2018. So far all the turtles in your section have been repeat customers, but hopefully some new space ladies will nest on your beach soon!
Have a wonderful and safe holiday weekend, and stay tuned for more updates!
Lizzy
May 9, 2025
We are back for everyone's favorite time of year! As I'm sure you are all familiar, sea turtle nesting season officially began on April 15th. We have not had much activity yet, so you'll have to settle for me talking about myself in this first update instead . I'm Lizzy, the Sea Turtle Morning Monitoring Intern for the 2025 season, and I am so excited to keep you all up to date on things sea turtle related on Sanibel and Captiva. A little about me, I am originally from the great state of New Jersey (home to the best bagels and pizza), but moved to the area about three years ago to obtain a Marine Science bachelor’s degree at Florida Gulf Coast University.
This year will be my second season with sea turtle nesting; last season I worked with FGCU and Florida Department of Environmental Protection on Don Pedro Island State park in Placida, Florida where we had 191 Loggerhead nests and 31 nests from Green sea turtles. Although it may seem like a small number compared to the 839 Loggerhead nests, 3 Green and 1 Leatherback on Sanibel and Captiva last year, we only had about 1.3 miles of beach! I was very pleased and fondly called all the hatchlings “my little peanuts”
Slowly but surely things have been picking up in the nesting world on Sanibel. Currently, we have a total of 21 nests between Sanibel and Captiva. It is very normal for these lovely ladies to have a slow start and then gradually the frequency of new nests increases until suddenly we have nests everywhere during the peak of nesting season, mid/end May to July.
Alright, now for the part you all came here for... what's going on the beach of Chateaux Sur Mer?? Currently there are two nests in this section, one on the edge of the Chateaux Sur Mer / Gulf Shores border, and one in the middle of the beach. Though the one on the border is a little close to call, it was lovingly laid by Cotton Candy, a loggerhead female that was first tagged on Sanibel in 2017 and returned to nest in 2021 and now again this year!
Typically, most sea turtle nesting programs use flat metal screens to protect the nests from predators, but for extra protection will sometimes use a cage that gets buried in the stand and creates more of a barrier between the nest and potential predators. For the 2025 nesting season, we are using the data from previous years regarding which areas have been the most affected by depredation, and focusing our caging efforts on those that had the greatest depredation rates. Unfortunately, in past years Chateaux Sur Mer has had high depredation, so all the nests in this area will be caged. But do not despair! This will hopefully reduce the nests that are predated and will allow for much greater hatchling success!! Since the beginning of nesting season tends to have a slow start, myself and Conner, our sea turtle technician, may be able to cage off nests in areas that will not be focused on as much when things start to pick up. That being said, if you see a skinny blonde girl with a staff shirt caging off nests, say hi and that you love receiving my emails and have been dying to meet me (it will make my day, even if it's not true). We will also be having some interns join us later in the season to work specifically on applying cages to these nests that are more vulnerable.
Attached are some pictures from my previous nesting season and of a cage compared to a regular screen. I'm looking forward to keeping you updated on this journey through the 2025 nesting season!
Have a wonderful weekend!
Lizzy