By Craig Pittman, Times Staff
Writer
In Print: Saturday, June 30, 2012
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Tropical Storm Debby did more than just wipe some of Pinellas County's
beaches off the map. The storm's pounding waves also destroyed scores of sea
turtle nests, potentially ruining what had been a record-breaking nesting
season.
"Obviously there's a lot of devastation," said David Yates of
the Clearwater Marine Aquarium, which coordinates sea turtle nesting surveys on
most of Pinellas' beaches. "We were having the best year in 15 years, and
now we've had a substantial washing away."
Sea turtle guardians still are compiling the numbers to chart the
losses, but early estimates are that they will be large. Fort De Soto Park
supervisor Jim Wilson figures about one-third of the nests there were wiped
out.
David Godfrey of the Sea Turtle Conservancy, the world's oldest sea
turtle research and conservation group, said that along the gulf coast up to
the Panhandle, "so far we're hearing that as many as half or more were
lost."
However, state sea turtle biologist Anne Meylan said those estimates may
be based on the loss of nest markers, not the nests.
"Losing your stakes isn't the same thing as losing the nests,"
noted Meylan, who works for the Florida Fish and Wildlife Research Institute in
St. Petersburg. As a result, she said, "It's premature to have any
estimate of an impact."
She also pointed out that several months still remain in turtle nesting
season, so, "We still have time to make up any losses."
From May until September, thousands of female sea turtles — loggerheads
and other species — crawl up on Florida beaches, dig a hole and drop in a
clutch of eggs, then cover it back up and swim away.
The turtles that lay the eggs are returning to the beaches where they
themselves hatched out some 30 years before.
Until this week, volunteers roving along the state's beaches were
reporting record high nest numbers, Godfrey said. And the nesting had begun
earlier than usual, too, he said.
But then Debby arrived, producing record rainfall and pounding waves
that washed away beaches, as well as the nests beneath them.
"Up to that point, we were way ahead of last year," Meylan
said.
South of the Tampa Bay area, researchers from Mote Marine Laboratory in
Sarasota checking on the 1,367 nests they had marked before the storm between
Longboat Key and Venice found markers remained for only 244 nests. That means
as many as 82 percent of local nests lost the yellow stakes placed for
identification — although it does not necessarily mean the nests are gone.
State biologists have been charting sea turtle nesting for more than 20
years. During that time, the nesting of loggerheads — the most common sea
turtle species, but still rare enough to be classified as
"threatened" — has been going downhill. The decline has been steepest
since a high of 59,918 nests were counted in 1998.
Last year, however, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation
Commission documented a record-high nest count for green turtles. Leatherback
turtles also had a high number of nests. Loggerhead nesting was close to its
five-year average.
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