A loggerhead sea turtle hatchling struggles to make its way over a thick bed of sargassum in late July at Red Reef Park in Boca Raton. Photos by Tim Stepien/The Coastal Star
By Jan Norris
Poor babies! Turtles, that is.
Hatchlings are crawling out from a record number of nests this year, but they’re having a tough summer trying to navigate the growing piles of sargassum at the shoreline to reach the ocean.
The mounds of brown seaweed, stretching for miles along the coast, affect beach visitors, too.
The sun-baked, decaying seaweed — and the debris and organisms that tumble in with it — stink.
The noxious smell is from a toxic hydrogen-sulfide gas the rotting weed gives off that with lengthy exposure can cause headaches, watery eyes and nausea.
“I’ve never seen it like this,” said Ryan Lillicotch. “Do they clean it up?”
He and his wife, Argentina, visiting from Washington, D.C., were walking along Delray Beach with nephews and nieces who had just arrived from Argentina.
Dozens of feet wide and more than 7 feet deep on the south side of the Boynton Inlet, the rotting sargassum gave off an odor so intense it followed a Coastal Star photographer back to his car.
The sargassum ran the length of the curving shore in an unbroken line, with more washing up as the tide pushed in.
Neat piles of freshly raked seaweed were stacked at the vegetation line high on the dunes in intervals.
“What do they do with all this?” Argentina Lillicotch asked. “Could they use it to spread around elsewhere as organic matter?”
The seaweed may be tilled into the sand as a soil enrichment for dune plants, but procedures for preparing it for use elsewhere are impractical.
“I guess it’s food for the fishes,” Ryan Lillicotch said, “but it’s a mess for the people.”
Sargassum is a natural occurrence in the Atlantic Ocean that has its greatest onshore impact during the spring and summer. The seaweed, floating in the ocean, is deposited on Florida beaches by wind and currents as it travels up the Gulf Stream.
“We get heavy sargassum every summer,” said Jennifer Cirillo, director of Palm Beach County Parks and Recreation.
The problem is exacerbated because the onslaught of seaweed coincides with turtle nesting season.
The sea algae tends to accumulate most heavily in the county on the beaches south of the town of Palm Beach, she said.
Lines of the brown, tangled weed are visible from the air up and down the coastline as well as in the water, where the healthy grass appears as yellow mats, floating in miles-long patches throughout the Caribbean and Atlantic Ocean.
While found all along both Florida’s coasts, it worsens along the southern tip, with the Keys particularly hard-hit this time of year.
Sargassum’s presence is complex: It’s beneficial for providing food sources and hiding places for small fish, crustaceans and sea turtle hatchlings, who float along with it in the water to the Sargasso Sea or Azores. When it washes ashore, it can aid beach renourishment efforts and dune stabilization.
But piling up as it has this summer, it impedes hatchlings heading out into the ocean, and deters visitors looking to enjoy the sand and surf.
Patricia Diaz, a Delray Beach resident, comes to the beach to sunbathe occasionally.
“It’s bad,” she said. “You can’t walk along the beach.”
Diaz says seaweed has always been present in summer, but she doesn’t remember it being this heavy in previous years.
“It used to be more natural. I don’t know how they’re going to get rid of it.”
While the seaweed has affected tourism numbers, there are only a couple of beaches that show fewer visitors than last year at this time, said Cirillo.
“It could be weather, or other factors, too,” she said, though the heavy seaweed, especially in South County, “definitely has had an effect.”
Ocean Inlet Park in Boynton Beach had 93,700 visitors in June, down 2.65% over last year. South Inlet Park in Boca Raton showed a 17.6% drop over last June, with only 18,758 beachgoers.
Palm Beach County has added warning signs at county parks, like at the Boynton Inlet.
Dealing with the mess
The county has a “hands-off” approach to sargassum, because of the benefits to dune retention, and to avoid turtle nest disruption.
There’s an economic reason, too. In years past, the county cleaned beaches regularly, using tractors pulling rakes. But in 2002, Cirillo said, “Money for cleaning was cut from our budget.” The figure was $90,000.
But in early July, the state made the county aware of a reimbursable grant program to help clean beaches.
“They’d be willing to reimburse $100,000 in one season to work with sargassum cleanup. They’re trying to work with us,” Cirillo said.
The South Inlet Park and Ocean Inlet Park county beaches were raked once in June, she said.
Crews in Delray Beach and Boca Raton are more proactive, raking the seaweed regularly — but even then, it still piles up.
The seaweed “season” doesn’t stop till early fall.
In a mid-July interview, Cirillo said the county is now monitoring Gulfstream Park for seaweed. “There’s quite a bit in the water,” she said.
It gets pushed onto beaches there and because of wind and tide patterns, she said, “it tends to not get washed away or leave in tidal currents.”
It’s usually left alone, or raked only slightly to provide pathways for rescue personnel and beach visitors, with a goal of leaving turtle nests undisturbed.
If “heavy, heavy mats” stay on shore, the county gets a permit to clean the beaches.
The county works with the Florida Department of Environmental Protection to rake up and till the seaweed under the sand. There, it stabilizes the sand dunes and nourishes vegetation that helps hold the sand on land. Turtle nests are monitored carefully.
Condo owners and single-family homeowners wanting beaches cleaned in front of their property must pay private concerns to do the work.
For example, South Palm Beach Mayor Rafael Pineiro said in a Town Council meeting that the condos in town are collaborating with Beachkeeper Inc. to have the beach raked three times a week and blend the weed into the sand, coordinating with wildlife agencies.
Lantana is raking its public beach twice a week, or on an as-needed basis, said Marc Fichtner, chief of Lantana’s Ocean Rescue Division. The Town Council’s decision to rake represents a policy shift. The beach is only 250 yards wide, in front of the Dune Deck Cafe.
Working with the agencies that protect the turtles and other beach wildlife, the town has permits to rake, he said.
A beachgoer lounges among turtle nests at Red Reef Park. The nest numbers by July had set records for Boca Raton beaches.
Big year for nesting
So far, there’s been no effect on the turtle nests from either the tilling or the seaweed mounds on the beaches, according to Dave Anderson, the sea turtle conservation coordinator at Gumbo Limbo Nature Center in Boca Raton.
“The mother turtles are 300 pounds or more. They have no trouble plowing through it. They may be deterred, and turn around and come back later.
“But what we see is a normal pattern.”
This is his 20th season monitoring turtle nesting in a 5-mile area north and south of the Boca Raton Inlet.
It’s a banner year for nesting in the county overall, he said.
“Leatherbacks broke our all-time high of 43,” Anderson said of the Boca Raton count.
Before the end of July, loggerhead nests also set a record on city beaches. The previous record, 1,075 nests, was broken July 25 when this year’s count reached 1,077.
From nest to ocean
While there’s no count of how many baby turtles make it from the nest to the ocean, Anderson said his staff works on percentages and estimates the success rate.
“We take an inventory of eggs in the nest and the percentage that hatch,” he said.
The sargassum mounds do work against the tiny turtles — especially those that hatch in the daytime.
“It’s always been a concern for a lot of the beach patrols and those who are going out in the morning and seeing hatchlings tangled in the sargassum,” said Dr. Sarah Milton, chair of the Department of Biological Sciences at Florida Atlantic University.
In 2013, her department researchers performed an experiment to test the hatchlings’ ability to climb over a mound of seaweed and get to the ocean.
Not surprisingly, the babies crawled more slowly up the seaweed piles. While they didn’t show distress at the end of the climbs, the seaweed slowed them significantly.
The researchers found in a previous study that sargassum had to be 30 centimeters high — about 1 foot — before hatchlings were altogether deterred.
But getting tangled in the mounds created another problem: The hatchlings were easy pickings for opportunistic predators such as crows — especially in the daytime — despite the camouflage.
“Most do hatch at night, but if they’re stuck in it and can’t get across, then they can die from heat and dehydration, or get picked off by predators,” Milton said.
A crow scurries away with a sea turtle hatchling at Red Reef Park.
Crows and shorebirds are attracted to the seaweed because of other creatures in it.
While it appears more crows are at the beach now, Milton said, “I hadn’t heard that. But the seaweed brings crabs and dead fish and other food with it. It’s like putting in a bird feeder. It doesn’t mean there are more birds — it just means they’ve found a food source.”
Anderson says his turtle patrol volunteers shoo the birds when possible. “But crows are smart. They’ll fly off with a hatchling, bury it near the shoreline and keep hunting.”
A seagull takes to the air with a hatchling, also at Red Reef Park.
People to the rescue
Beachgoers finding hatchlings stuck in the weeds in the daytime are encouraged to take them to Gumbo Limbo Nature Center in Boca Raton.
A cooler on the front porch has a poster instructing rescuers how to leave the turtles inside.
“We encourage people to utilize it if they find hatchlings in trouble,” Anderson said. It’s not illegal to rescue hatchlings, especially those picked at by crows, or tangled in the weeds.
“Most likely, it’s daytime and the babies are exhausted. They’ve been out all night, and are too exhausted to make that swim. They have a better chance once we get our hands on them,” he said.
“We evaluate them — rinse them off, examine them and deem them healthy enough to be released at night, or we take them to the rehab center at the Palm Beach Zoo.”
Sea Turtle Specialists, a newly established rehabilitation center at the zoo, is run by Whitney Crowder, former sea turtle rehab director at Gumbo Limbo.
Hatchlings crawling for their lives already have survived nest attacks from predatory animals — foxes, raccoons and coyotes digging up nests to eat eggs.
At night, the yellow-crowned night herons pick them off once hatched.
But with more people monitoring the turtles, and increased awareness that includes restrictions on light pollution, the turtles have a better chance each year, Anderson said.
“Everything’s beachy on our end.”
The seaweed-turtle-human situation isn’t really a problem for beach lover Larina Maldonado, either.
A Delray Beach resident, she comes to the beach often.
She’s sitting on the sand on a July morning, “to get some peace; clear my head.”
To her, the seaweed is just part of nature. “It really doesn’t bother me. I’m a big respecter of habitat. I’m just visiting — this is someone else’s home.”
Robert Haughn contributed to this story.
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