The Anna Maria Island Turtle Watch (AMITW) had an exceptional summer in 2024. By July 31, AMITW patrollers had documented 683 nests on 9.6 miles (15.4 kilometers) of beach on Anna Maria Island, Florida. That was the most nests they had recorded in one season since they started monitoring 41 years ago.
Volunteers had taken the required Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC) and AMITW training to be on the FWC Marine Turtle Permit, which allowed them to work with sea turtles protected by the Endangered Species Act of 1973. These permitted volunteers surveyed the entire island every morning at dawn, starting from the beginning of the nesting season on April 15.
Each day they identified, logged, and took GPS coordinates for any new sea turtle crawls they saw, marked nests with four wooden stakes, and checked on every incubating nest. Some days were easy — marking a few nests, checking on the rest, and getting off the beach before 10 a.m.
Activity picked up in June, when nesting peaked and hatchings started. Volunteers had to carry extra water, electrolytes, sunscreen, and snacks to make it through long hours in the heat and humidity.
The motivation to persevere was strong — loggerhead sea turtles (Caretta caretta) were having a record year, likely thanks to AMITW’s efforts more than 30 years ago, which helped ensure a new generation of sea turtles make it to the sea. Loggerheads mature at 25 to 30 years old, so sea turtles that the first conservation efforts saved are now returning as nesting adults. Their presence is particularly important because nearly half of the world’s population of loggerheads were born on Florida beaches.
Then Hurricane Debby hit in early August. The daily patrol was called off as heavy surf and storm tides swallowed the beach along with at least 200 turtle nests. Our boom season had turned to gloom. Turtle patrollers spent the next few days assessing what was left and using a special high-accuracy GPS to locate nests that survived but had lost all their marking stakes.
Only two new nests were found in the coming weeks, indicating that the mother turtles were done laying for the season, although hatching would continue for a couple more months. Hatching usually occurs at night, and volunteers discover them during morning nest checks when they spot more than a hundred hatchling tracks originating from a depression inside the marked area. The tracks illustrate the direction in which the hatchlings traveled.
Light is an important sea-finding cue for sea turtles. Both hatchlings and adults head away from the darkness and shadows of the dunes and vegetation and toward the brightest horizon. On a dark beach this would be the stars and moon in the night sky. Artificial light, however, poses a hazard to sea turtles.
When artificial light is visible to sea turtles, is brighter than the night sky, or illuminates an area of the beach that is normally dark, it can cause the turtle to travel in the wrong direction, which is called disorientation. A disoriented turtle uses more energy traveling around the area and may dehydrate or run into predators or other hazards, such as a road. This problem is why the cities on Anna Maria Island require people to close their blinds and turn off their outside lights at night during the hatching season.
In places where light is necessary, turtle-friendly red or amber LED bulbs and recessed fixtures or shields prevent light from reaching the beach. Sea turtles’ eyes primarily see the blue end of the light spectrum because of how colors at the red end attenuate at depth in the water. Although sea turtles can see red light, they don’t pay as much attention to it.
When a nest disorients, it is typically reported to local code enforcement officers, who try to identify the light source and prevent future disorientations. AMITW patrollers respond to calls at night and early morning when people find disoriented hatchlings in hazardous places such as a road, a pool, or inside storm drains. Sometimes rain washes away the faint hatchling tracks, and we don’t know if a nest has disoriented until we receive a call.
We release any hatchlings we find right away or hold them until nightfall so they can rest, and then we release them on a dark part of the beach. While everyone delights in seeing a sea turtle hatchling, fewer disorientations are preferable. In 2024 we had 94 disorientations, including one adult that wandered into the road and was tragically struck by a car.
While most locals know about sea-turtle-friendly practices, many visitors do not — they are likely from other states and countries, most of which don’t have sea turtles. New visitors arrive every week, so education is key. Whether providing informational visitor packets, teaching free turtle talks, or answering questions while on patrol, AMITW volunteers do their best to get the word out.
Being turtle-friendly is much more than picking up trash. It’s filling in holes and knocking down sandcastles so tiny hatchlings stay safe on their maiden journey to the water. Removing belongings from the beach is crucial as well — no one wants to come out in the morning and find a sea turtle tangled in a chair or canopy.
Most important, maintaining a dark beach is critical for turtles to reach the ocean. No light is optimal, and red light is best when you must use light within sight of the beach. After watching a tiny hatchling brave the beach and the huge body of water in front of it, who doesn’t want to help them survive by using turtle-friendly practices?
Nest inventories are great educational opportunities. Every nest on the island gets inventoried three days after a hatch (giving time for the stragglers to get out on their own) or at 70 days when the nest is considered overdue. We remove the nests’ contents and count the eggshells to determine how many eggs hatched and how many hatchlings made it out.
Before Hurricane Debby, more than 190 nests hatched, and nest inventories often revealed excellent hatch percentages. We even sometimes found a live hatchling that hadn’t made it out yet. The storm surge from Debby, however, covered the beach for several hours over several days.
While some overwash from tides is OK for sea turtle nests — it often reduces the temperature and prevents nests from drying out in the summer heat — eggs being underwater for days deprives them of the critical gas exchange needed to survive.
We didn’t observe many hatches for the rest of the season. Without a hatch depression, patrollers may need to dig the entire 3-foot by 3-foot (0.9 meters by 0.9 meters) staked-off area to a depth of 3 feet (0.9 m) or more until they locate the egg chamber or have to abandon the inventory.
After Debby, most egg chambers we found were filled with unhatched eggs that had stopped developing. Nests with 0% hatch success, however, provide important data about productivity each year.
Occasionally, we found a few hatched eggs among the unhatched ones. Hatches that happen despite heavy overwash demonstrate the sea turtles’ resilience. The hatchlings that made it out of those nests have the genetics to survive the storm tides. As climate change produces stronger storms and beaches continue to erode, these turtles will produce successful nests in years to come.
To add insult to injury, at the end of September, with only eight nests left on the beach, along came back-to-back hurricanes Helene and Milton. The storms flooded the island homes and businesses, flattened the dunes, and moved sand inland. They also decimated much of the dune vegetation and washed out the remaining nests. Turtle season had ended abruptly.
Mother Nature can be hard on the turtles some years, but they have reproductive strategies to counter such events. One female will lay five to seven nests every couple of years, each containing an average of 100 eggs, and she will continue to breed for many decades. Despite the devastating storms, 20,633 hatchlings emerged from 284 nests on Anna Maria Island in 2024, contributing to the next generation of loggerheads. Since 1983 AMITW has documented 8,132 sea turtle nests that have produced more than 400,000 hatchlings.
AMITW will face new challenges in 2025. The loss of the dunes and vegetation means turtles can see more light sources from the beach, and most areas have lost their dark background and the barrier between the beach and the road. As the island rebuilds and recovers from the storm damage that destroyed homes and forced businesses to close, it is tough to prioritize turtle-friendly practices.
AMITW will continue to work with local and state stakeholders to ensure the conservation of sea turtles on the island so that they remain a beloved fixture there for future generations of locals and visitors. AD
Explore More
Learn more about the sea turtle patrols in this video.
© Alert Diver – Q2 2025
