When sea turtles hatch in the dark, they make their way to the ocean
like these three little loggerheads.
File Photo
A cooler with instructions for leaving hatchlings
sits near the front door of the Gumbo Limbo Nature Center.
Tim Stepien/The Coastal Star
By Ron Hayes
If you spy a baby turtle aimlessly wandering the beach some sunny morning this summer, please be aware that it is not drunk, on drugs or running away from home.
“It’s disoriented,” says Dr. Kirt Rusenko, marine conservationist at the Gumbo Limbo Nature Center in Boca Raton. “If a hatchling isn’t running straight toward the water, that’s because it’s exhausted from the night before. And people need to bring it in to us.”
Every turtle nesting season since 1995, the Gumbo Limbo “Turtle Hatchling Dropoff Box” has helped disoriented newborns find their way safely home to the sea.
The box, which looks suspiciously like your basic party-sized beer cooler with a layer of sand in the bottom, is waiting just to the right of the center’s front door.
Now, here’s how baby turtles wind up in a beer cooler:
Turtle eggs hatch at night and the newborns — weighing about an ounce and no more than 3 inches long — head for the sea, guided by the moonlight on the water. Then they begin swimming toward their permanent habitat, the weedline of the Sargasso Sea, 20 miles out.
That’s how nature planned it, anyway. But in the presence of artificial light from passing cars, condo windows or the “sky-glow” thrown by city lights, hatchlings are easily confused and head for the wrong lights.
That hatchling you find on your morning walk has been wandering the sand all night.
So why not just carry it gently down to the water yourself?
“If you put a hatchling in the water when it’s exhausted,” Rusenko explains, “it will swim around close to shore until a fish eats it. It will not make it to the Sargasso Sea.”
Bring the hatchling to the dropoff box and the Gumbo Limbo staff will evaluate it and release it the next night. Or try to.
“Some will just sit there,” Rusenko says, “so those we bring back and feed until we get 200 or 300 and our volunteers and the Coast Guard take them all out to the Sargasso Sea.”
Yes, you read that correctly.
“We get at least 6,000 hatchlings each year,” Rusenko reports. “Folks bring them here from around South Palm Beach down to Broward County. One year we got 12,000, about two-thirds of which came from the dropoff box.”
The box is placed by the center’s door when the first hatchlings appear on the sand; but, Rusenko says, climate change is causing the season to commence earlier than normal.
“The temperatures are getting warmer over our area, so again this year in the state we had a dozen nests laid in February, and the season doesn’t start until March. At our center, we had one nest in February.
“We leave the box out until all the nests are gone. One nest waited until Thanksgiving to hatch.”
For more information, call the Gumbo Limbo Nature Center at 544-8605 or visit gumbolimbo.org.
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