Nesting season on Anna Maria Island has produced more than 27,000 sea turtle hatchlings and there are still 100 nests due to hatch.
“We are finding a few hatches each day and inventorying every nest three days after the hatch is documented,” Kristen Mazzarella, executive director of Anna Maria Island Turtle Watch and Shorebird Monitoring, told The Islander Sept. 5.
She also said, “We continue to see an excellent emergence success rate.
The rate is the percentage of eggs with hatchlings emerging from the nest and the average rate this season is 69%.
However, AMITW continues to document disorientations, incidents in which sea turtles travel away from the Gulf of Mexico.
“We have documented 140 nests with hatchling disorientations this year,” Mazzarella said. “This is very sad news. This means that a minimum of 3,854 hatchlings from 140 nests traveled the wrong way by following artificial lighting and may or may not have made it to the water.”
“Even more sad,” she said, “is the news that we have documented at least 169 dead hatchlings as a result of disorientations.”
The “lights out” season continues on AMI beaches until Oct. 31 and Mazzarella asked people to “please spread the word about keeping the beach dark for the remaining hatchlings so we can make sure they make it to the Gulf safely.”
As of Sept. 5, AMITW reported 542 sea turtle nests, 828 false crawls, 387 hatched nests, 27,887 hatchlings, 30 adult disorientations and 140 hatchling disorientations.