The 2007 nesting season has finally come to an end. As of today, there is only one green turtle nest left here on Juno Beach and I expect it should hatch any night now.
This was another record setting year for leatherbacks with thirty more nests recorded than the 2001 season. A graph of the nesting trend can be viewed under the research section of this site.
All of us were extremely busy this season and we did not have much time to keep this site updated. I am very sorry for that and we will certainly do a better job next season!
Why were we so busy? Well, this year the Loggerhead Marinelife Center took on a much larger monitoring project. We developed a partnership with an engineering firm - Taylor Engineering and an environmental consulting firm - Ecological Associates to conduct turtle monitoring on a much longer survey area than in the past. The new group worked each morning (and often well into the afternoon!) along the beach from John D. MacArthur State Park all the way north to the Palm Beach/Martin County line. This area encompasses some of the most dense sea turtle nesting in the United States and we were very busy. Over the course of the season we documented more than 17,000 sea turtle crawls along the beach, dug up more than 1000 nests to assess the productivity of all of those turtles.
On the leatherback front, we had a lot of fun this season. We encountered turtles almost every night we were on the beach and sometimes caught more than ten leatherbacks a night! Our crew encountered nesting leatherbacks 141 times this year and counted 106 individual leatherbacks nesting this season. 47 of those turtles were new to this beach and it was always exciting to find new turtles each night.
