The number of leatherback nests recorded along our entire survey area is now over 170 with more than 107 nests on Juno Beach alone! This season looks to be a record year.

We have been spotting around 5 turtles a night for the past week or so and it has been a lot of fun out there. Many of the turtles we are encountering are new to our beach, but we are seeing a lot of our "old friends" One of the older girls is "Ikeya". She first nested during the 2002 season and she is pretty big - 168 centimeters long!
Ikeya is interesting because she is tends to nest on the same nights each season (May 24th). She also has a wild habit of switching beaches between the south end of Juno Beach and Boca Raton which is more than 50 kilometers to the south. She has been spotted twice on Boca Raton beaches and three times along our beach. She is also one of the few turtles that has nested two years in a row.

Last night was a busy one! There were eight nests along our survey area and were able to observe six of the eight turtles as they nested. Many of the turtles were found on the south end of the survey area in MacArthur Beach State Park.
One of the oddest things we have found in a while was found on one of our turtles last night. Katharine discovered some fishing gear on a nesting leatherback at about 4am. We sometimes find commercial longline gear on our girsl, but this was recreational fishing tackle. The turtle had a Pompano fishing rig, with a hook through one of her rear flippers. These types of rigs usually have two or more hooks and this one had two hooks. The second hook had caught one of the turtles "companion remoras" and was dragged up the beach behind the turtle. The story didn't end well for the fish, but we did remove the hook from her flipper and she returned to the water.

I know, I know! Sorry for the lack of updates here on the site. We have really been very busy out there each night and each morning. This season we are conducting our nightly patrols in addition to patrolling a much larger morning survey area. The Marinelife Center in partnership with Ecological Associates in Jensen Beach is now conducting sea turtle work along the beach from the Martin County line all the way south to MacArthur Beach State Park. This area contains some of the most important nesting beach in the state for leatherback turtles and we are very excited to be out there. It is a lot of work, and I guess the project log posts are suffering. I will try to keep everyone updated!

Hey Chris and team
Wishing you well overnight every night!

What impact are you seeing from the abandoned sailboat that has now been smashed into a million pieces? I'm especially concerned about the jagged pieces that are at the waterline straight out from crossover 13. I know turtles have been navigating around human debris on this shoreline for more than 500 years, but it's still disconcerting.
Any thoughts?

Good luck! Lynne33458

I'm not sure how to use this site, sorry! Compared to last year you are all posting very few blogs, is this due to the pressure of work load? You have reported so far a lot of leatherbacks. Or is it the pounding waves? On the Jupiter Inlet cams, I see the sea seems to have eroded the beach somewhat. Hope your work is continuing well. Best wishes Liz.

Last, night we had another one of those very lucky nights where we were able to spot every turtle as they exited the surf and crawled up the beach! At about 11:30pm we spotted a new turtle that nested near the kitesurfing beach in Jupiter. We made sure she was going to nest and then quickly rode up the beach about a mile to find another turtle crawling out of the surf. Again, we made sure she was going to stick around and then headed north a bit before turning around to head back to the first turtle. As we were approaching the second girl, I looked through the scope and was a bit confused?? Why was she crawling back up the beach?? Then, looking up the beach a bit, I realized that it was ANOTHER turtle! Three turtles on the beach at the same time. It was gonna be a long night!

Lat night was the first night it really felt like summer. Hot, humid, buggy and stormy. It was the first night with small thunderstorms moving up and down the coast. The lightning was very pretty for a while. I have been trying to capture an image of a leatherback nesting with a lightning storm in the background for as long as I have been carrying a camera with me. I really thought last night was the night, but the turtles didn't show up in time! They did eventually show up though. Three turtles nested last night; Sedna, a new turtle and another turtle that I did not see. I spent too much time with the first two and I just missed the third. I really hate that!

Things are going well on the beach and we have been having a lot of fun out there. I have already spotted seven turtles since Sunday! The number of leatherback nests here on Juno Beach continues to climb and we have a few more nests than this date last season. I do still think it will be a great year based on the number of turtles nesting on beaches to the north of us. In some areas the nest numbers are double the "normal" numbers for this time of year.
Sorry to report that our new Fastloc GPS tags have stopped functioning! I am not really sure what the problem is, but one of the top things on my short list of items is a very large male leatherback turtle. One of the tags failed when the turtle was a good distance off the coast near Cape Canaveral which is almost the same exact location where we lost a transmitter in the 2005 season. That girl came back to nest with her entire harness missing and we think she may have had an interaction with a biting male leatherback!

Just wanted to report a very cool finding from an hour ago. On my first pass up north I found a dead northern gannet (Morus bassanus). The bird had a large metal band on it's left thigh, partially embedded in its skin. Knowing how important it is to researchers to hear reports about their tagged animals, I recorded the tag number and typed it into the bird banding website (USGS Patuxent Wildlife Research Center). It returned some really awesome information! This adult gannet was tagged in 1988 in Labrador, Canada.

It just goes to show how much you can learn by paying attention to tags and

Last night was a rewarding night for me! Over the last few weeks of riding the beach at night, I haven't really encountered any turtles. I've been covering the north route, from the Marinelife Center to the Jupiter Inlet, and just haven't been lucky. This weekend, despite the horrible windy, wavy, salty weather, I really enjoyed my nights. On Saturday night, Sandy spotted two turtles on the south end, and I did get to see one (Lyra, first spotted in 2001!).

Last night, was pretty crazy. On my first run I came across a leatherback by the Jupiter Beach Resort; she was just crawling out of the water, which is such a cool thing to see, they look SO big! She turned out to be a turtle named Nashira, tagged in 2003 I think. But she needed new tags, so I worked her up and moved south down the beach where there was another turtle just north of the Jupiter Reef Club! This turtle was new and needed a full work up, metal tags, PIT tag, genetic sample, measurements, and metal scan (for any embedded longline hooks). I was ecstatic, since it has been a long time since I've gotten to tag and name a new turtle. I decided to call her Iris. She was a pretty turtle, hardly any marks on her, no chunks taken out of her flippers (sort of a rare thing to see such a good lookin' turt).