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The Great Escape
A baby loggerhead instinctively heads for the water after emerging from a nest in the dunes of Isle of Palms, where more than 180 Island Turtle Team volunteers help watch out for sea turtles from May through October.
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Bucket brigade
Tee Johannes, a volunteer with the Island Turtle Team, gives baby loggerhead stragglers a lift to water’s edge in the turtle team’s signature red bucket.
Photo by Mic Smith
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Treasure below
The Beach House author and Island Turtle Team member Mary Alice Monroe pulls out what’s left of the eggs—leathery shells that look like dented ping pong balls—from a loggerhead nest on Isle of Palms while Tee Johannes begins the inventory.
Photo by Mic Smith
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Finding refuge
Jerry Tupacz with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service keeps meticulous records on turtle nests within the boundaries of Cape Romain National Wildlife Refuge. Cape Island had more than 2,000 nests in 2019, with nearly 3,500 total recorded in the refuge, the most significant loggerhead nesting ground north of Cape Canaveral.
Photo by Mic Smith
The baby loggerheads wriggle their way across the beach to the Atlantic Ocean an hour or so after daybreak on a Sunday morning in August. They just hatched into the world out of Isle of Palms Nest 28, bubbling up from a sand dune as true instant celebrities and drawing a crowd of beachgoers.
Island Turtle Team volunteers called to the scene carry stragglers—each no bigger than the palm of a human hand—closer to the water’s edge so the hatchlings aren’t accidentally stepped on by passersby on this popular stretch of coastline.
Tiny waves lap over the last few just as a trio of surprised surfers walks out of the ocean. Even though they are visiting from Greenville, they know about the magic of sea turtles and the perils of their journey.
“No way!” they exclaim as they verify what they are witnessing with the turtle team. “That’s so cool!”
The tallest, 21-year-old Will Logan, welcomes a baby sea turtle coming toward his feet. “I believe in you,” he says as the turtle’s dive instinct kicks in and tiny flippers take the first strokes of a potentially epic swim. “Shred the eternal gnar!”
Other surfers would understand the meaning: Live large and never give up. And for a baby sea turtle, that’s good advice. Nature stacks significant odds against an individual hatchling from the start, and conservationists say that loggerheads, which have been listed as threatened since 1978 under the Endangered Species Act, face escalating manmade threats including boat strikes, coastal development, plastic pollution, climate change and rising sea levels.
Yet there are reasons for hope as the loggerhead nest count along South Carolina shores has trended upward over the past decade, spiking in 2019 to a record 8,721. Of those, 40 percent are concentrated in Cape Romain National Wildlife Refuge, where staff and volunteers race to tend to them all.
The numbers are an encouraging sign that the global sea turtle conservation movement our state has helped lead for more than 40 years is paying off larger dividends than expected. “It’s been sort of jaw-dropping,” admits Sally Murphy, a champion for sea turtles since her early days with S.C. Department of Natural Resources in the 1970s.
Digging in with turtle teams
The data-driven effort to protect sea turtles and unravel their secrets involves a multitude of South Carolinians each year, including more than 1,100 volunteers who are part of a coastal network of 30 nest protection projects reporting to DNR.
By the start of May, “turtle teams” begin early morning beach walks looking daily for tracks of mother turtles, mostly loggerheads, which typically arrive under cover of night, laying an average of 120 eggs at a time before slipping back into the ocean. The volunteers continue their efforts to protect and catalog nests through mid-October, when the season’s hatchlings have finished erupting.
The Island Turtle Team for Isle of Palms and neighboring Sullivan’s Island monitors 10 miles of beaches with 180 members and a waiting list of others eager to join. Its ranks include resident novelist Mary Alice Monroe, whose 2002 breakthrough bestseller, The Beach House, and the 2018 Hallmark movie it inspired have drawn national attention to the cause and spurred many to get involved with turtle teams in their own communities.
A few days after the initial “boil” of hatchlings at Nest 28 on Isle of Palms, volunteers are scheduled to investigate the nest’s remains, but because they are at the apex of the hatching period in a record-breaking year, it will be one of the last of five nests inventoried this morning.
Back home from a book tour, Monroe joins them in a team T-shirt, ready to dig in, both as a volunteer and a writer. While her environmental fiction has also drawn attention to other animals, like dolphins and shorebirds, she intends to return to sea turtles with a sixth title in The Beach House series, compelled by issues related to climate change and pollution as well as the triumphs and questions emerging out of the busy nesting season, which got off to an exceptionally early start.
“I wasn’t planning on doing another Beach House for a while,” she says, “but so much is unusual this year.”
Citizen scientists
Monroe may be the literary celebrity in the mix, but her longtime friend, Mary Pringle, is the team’s project leader. She holds the team’s DNR permit, helps train volunteers, documents nesting success and writes regular turtle updates for the island newspaper.
Pringle explains to the group gathered that she feels attached to the first nest on the morning’s schedule because she’s the one who found it, so she will take the lead on the inventory. Soon she’s on her knees, plunging her arm into a cavity about 20 inches down into the sandy beach. Smiling in spite of the stench, she pulls out what’s left behind for sorting by three other veterans, including Monroe.
“So what’s the count, ladies?” Pringle asks once she finishes retrieving the leathery shells left behind by hatchlings, each with the appearance of a dented ping pong ball.
Of the 117 eggs in the clutch, 112 hatched. Four didn’t develop, and only one hatchling died without making it out of the nest—a high success rate that fits another of the year’s trends.
These citizen scientists rebury the shells to enrich the dune ecosystem. When the nest was originally found, they saved a sample for an ongoing DNA fingerprinting project by University of Georgia researchers that now involves all sea turtle nests counted in Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina. After 11 years, he project has identified around 11,000 loggerhead moms, and started to follow their reproductive habits.
The team follows the same script as they travel down the beach to four other inventories, ending mid-island with Nest 28 and Nest 29, which are next to one another. Two months
earlier, volunteers moved these nests here from the island’s northeast tip, where they were more vulnerable to being washed away, to safer ground, as DNR allows them.
Before the season’s end, the volunteers will log 72 nests for their two islands, the most recorded by the team since it officially formed in 1995. This morning, the excitement comes when seven live hatchlings are found underground in Nest 29. Volunteers place them in the team’s trademark red bucket and carry them close to the water, but several hatchlings struggle in the waves. Monroe quietly acknowledges that those left behind in the nest are less likely to survive in the ocean, where everything that’s bigger than them is a potential predator.
That’s nature’s hand, and while there’s still much to learn about the loggerhead’s life cycle, it’s commonly cited that as few as one in 1,000 hatchlings may survive to adulthood. Those hatchlings that navigate ocean currents across the North Atlantic gyre to waters as far away as the Canary Islands will return to the U.S. southeast coast in about 8 to 10 years. By then they may grow up to 3½ feet long and 350 pounds. At that point, the big threats they face come from sharks and humans.
Persistence pays off
To understand why the upward trend in nest numbers makes sense, it helps to know more about sea turtle biology and some history.
Female loggerheads are estimated to reach reproduction age between 25 to 35 years old, so the first generation of hatchlings to benefit from turtle teams and other protective efforts just started coming of age and laying their own eggs in recent years.
South Carolina’s turtle teams emerged from Murphy’s initial work with DNR to establish a stranding network of volunteers to record the number of adult turtles washing up after being injured or killed. As the effort started in 1980, with only half the beaches monitored, the count of dead turtles on South Carolina shores reached nearly 600, which Murphy maintains was only a fraction of the adult turtles dying, many from becoming tangled in the nets of shrimp trawlers.
She needed data to support requirements for commercial shrimpers’ nets to have turtle excluder devices (TEDs). But as her recruits walked the beaches, they also noticed turtle nests at risk.
“It was their initiative that started the nest protection projects,” recalls Murphy, who released her memoir, Turning the Tide, in 2018. “As one beach had a project, the island next
door would find out about it, and they would call and say they wanted to start a project, too, just sort of a domino effect all along the coast.”
At the same time, Murphy continued the controversial fight for TEDs even after shrimpers, stirred by fears that the devices would diminish their harvests, strung up a likeness of her after one of their meetings. South Carolina set the stage for TED requirements, first passing regulations in 1988, ahead of other states and the federal government. While legal wrangling would continue into the early 2000s, TEDs are credited with playing a significant role in preventing sea turtle deaths.
With Murphy’s pioneering leadership, South Carolina became increasingly protective of sea turtles, naming the loggerhead as the state reptile, clamping down on egg poaching and launching Lights Out campaigns to keep beaches dark at night, allowing turtles to nest without disruption or disorientation.
With the 2000 opening of the South Carolina Aquarium in Charleston, the attention magnified thanks to the popularity of its resident loggerhead, Caretta, and the aquarium’s Sea Turtle Hospital, which has returned more than 280 turtles to the ocean in public releases that attract crowds of fans. The Sea Turtle Hospital expanded in 2017 with an exhibit to give all visitors a window into care for patients recovering from boat strikes, entanglement in fishing lines, ingestion of plastic bags and other stresses.
Kelly Thorvalson has worked with the aquarium since before it opened and now serves as its conservation programs manager. While those in her field have patiently persisted, waiting for positive results like this year’s sea turtle nest totals, they now worry about new disruptors on marine ecosystems.
Climate change, sea level rise and plastic pollution were constant topics at this year’s International Sea Turtle Symposium in Charleston. “There is a lot of optimism for sea turtle populations,” Thorvalson says. “But there are looming conservation issues that could undo the progress we’ve made.”
Critical Cape Romain
The drama of this year’s sea turtle nesting season in South Carolina was at its most intense in Cape Romain National Wildlife Refuge, where nest numbers for Bulls, Lighthouse and Cape islands totaled 3,538.
Located off the coast near the fishing village of McClellanville, Cape Romain provides the most significant loggerhead nesting ground north of Cape Canaveral, Florida. At the refuge’s
easternmost point of Cape Island, small teams working seven days a week on the remote spit of sand staked off 2,040 loggerhead nests with numbered PVC pipes in dense clusters along the beach.
“This year, we had more nests than anybody alive has ever seen,” says Chris Crolley of Coastal Expeditions Foundation, one of the groups helping to staff the refuge’s sea turtle program after significant losses in federal funding.
Loggerhead nesting numbers are cyclical and can vary widely from year to year. Over the past decade, state totals dropped as low as 2,080 in 2014, yet pushed up overall with a previous high of 6,435 recorded in 2016, including 2,498 nests counted that year at Cape Romain.
This year’s count at Cape Romain surpassed its 2016 count by more than 1,000, though Hurricane Dorian’s visit at the start of September likely ruined some late-season nests before they could hatch. Dorian’s impact could have been worse if it had turned into more of a flooding event, Crolley says, but even as he recognizes the problems hurricanes can pose, his larger concerns revolve around rising sea levels, which could lead to more drowned nests and cause Cape Island to eventually disappear.
Crolley, who provides nature tours through Coastal Expeditions outfitters, says there’s no better place than Cape Island to bolster the loggerhead population through nest protection and research.
In fact, Cape Island has already made significant contributions to the DNA data set being amassed. Scientists can see that turtles arriving there are nesting alongside their mothers and grandmothers, even though evidence also suggests nesting “site fidelity” is not universal. A turtle typically lays several clutches of eggs through a season, and may return to the same area each time, or choose different locations, with a small percentage laying clutches in different states.
Solving mysteries like these could play an important role in safeguarding a future for these ancient creatures as they adapt to a rapidly changing world. “The more we can understand about sea turtles,” Crolley says, “the better position we are in to make right choices when trying to help them.”
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How you can help sea turtles
Donate to the Cape Romain National Wildlife Refuge Sea Turtle Project, created by Coastal Expeditions Foundation to protect South Carolina’s largest turtle nesting site.
Become a sea turtle guardian with the South Carolina Aquarium and its Sea Turtle Care Center.
Support S.C. DNR protection efforts by getting a sea turtle license plate, contributing to the Endangered Wildlife Fund on your state taxes or joining DNR’s Adopt a Nest program.
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