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Weather entombs sea turtles in nests
By CRAIG PITTMAN © St. Petersburg Times, published September 19, 2000 ST. PETE BEACH -- Bruno Falkenstein dug into the sand Monday morning. He didn't like what he found. Buried in what had been a sea turtle nest were 84 loggerhead hatchlings, all of them dead. They had been drowned by the roaring waves tossed up by Hurricane Gordon on Sunday. "I've been watching that nest," Falkenstein said. "They were ready to hatch." Sea turtles might have been the only casualties of the mild-mannered Gordon, which briefly sideswiped the Tampa Bay area before staggering ashore in Florida's Big Bend on Sunday night. Out of 28 sea turtle nests on St. Pete Beach, Falkenstein, a former city commissioner whose family owns the Hurricane restaurant, said he counted seven washed away by the storm. Falkenstein said this was the biggest storm-related washout of turtle nests he has seen on St. Pete Beach in his 22 years of monitoring turtle nesting there. The washed out nests, all loggerheads, were on the beach between 23rd Avenue and 32nd Avenue. Elsewhere in Pinellas County the losses were far smaller. Glenn Harman of the Clearwater Marine Science Center said that out of 168 nests from Upham Beach to Caladesi Island, only two were lost to the storm surge. The washouts occurred on Treasure Island and Belleair Shore, Harman said. But most of the other nests along the county's beaches already had hatched by the time Gordon blundered by. Overall this year's nesting season was a successful one in Pinellas, Harman said. About 145 of the 168 nests hatched, "so we had about 12,000 hatchlings," he said. "This storm occurred toward the end of the nesting season, so we're lucky in that respect," Harman said. Gordon did less harm to turtle nests than Hurricane Earl did in 1998, which wiped out three-fourths of Pinellas' nests. In 1995 Hurricane Allison wiped out all but two of Pinellas County's turtle nests. There were far more nests washed away south of Pinellas, in Sarasota County, but there were far more nests there, too. For instance, 50 of the 704 turtle nests on Casey Key were washed away, said Terri Behle of Mote Marine Laboratory. State wildlife officials had no formal statewide tally but said there were likely few nests lost north of Pinellas because the coastline there tends to be too swampy to appeal to turtles searching for a sandy place to bury their eggs. Nesting season for sea turtles, all of which are either classified as threatened or endangered species, lasts from May through July. It takes the eggs 60 days to hatch. Usually only 50 percent of the hatchlings survive to maturity. Some are eaten by predators, such as raccoons. Sometimes the hatchlings become disoriented by beach lighting, head away from the surf and wind up being run over by cars. Although hurricane-driven tides can drown the eggs, which are buried about 2 feet deep in the sand, bad weather generally is not the worst thing that can happen. Female loggerheads might nest as many as 12 times during a season, and thus might nest again in the same area after a storm washes one nest away.
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