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Today's Our Daily Planet is dedicated to sea turtles and their conservation. We hope you enjoy it. Have a great weekend and we will be back on Monday with our usual news coverage.
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 People
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ICYMI: Administrator Pruitt Resigned
We interrupt our sea turtle coverage to bring you this news. President Trump "accepted" EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt's resignation yesterday. No surprise there. It was only a matter of time. Deputy Administrator Andrew Wheeler will be Acting Administrator starting on Monday. No other explanation was given as to why now. We suspect more details will emerge. Stay tuned to ODP and we will bring you more coverage next week. Now back to turtles!
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 Animals
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Saving Loggerheads At Dawn, One Nest At A Time
It’s dawn on Sea Island, Georgia, a small, beachside resort famous for its nostalgic southern charm and family atmosphere. But this year, Sea Island is also attracting an increasing number of mothers of another sort—female loggerhead turtles who are coming back "home" to lay their eggs. Loggerhead moms have already made nearly 50 nests this summer, and there is still at least a month to go in the season. The first nest laid back in early May should hatch any day now.
Early every morning, a squad of Sea Island naturalists and vacationing volunteers patrols the beach looking for telltale turtle tracks. We were out by 6 a.m. and scoured the beach until we found the unmistakable markings of a turtle mother’s trek from the ocean to the dunes to lay her eggs.
We found three nests—an extraordinary thrill for me, but not so uncommon during the summer months here. The tracks of the mothers were still visible. We followed them to their endpoint, and our guide gently tapped the sand with a pointed stick until she identified the nest. She took GPS readings so that each nest’s location would be documented, and then assessed the site to determine its suitability. Two of the three nests were too close to the high tide mark, she concluded, and would not likely survive.
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That’s when the real fun began.
We burrowed with our hands into the sand until we uncovered the mother lode of eggs in the nests—more than 100 in each—about a foot below the surface. One egg was removed for genetic testing to identify the mother turtle, but then we took all the others out and laid them into a bucket containing some cushioning sand until they filled the whole thing to the top. Turtle eggs are each about the size of a golf ball, but smooth and a little bit squishy. They are relatively hard to break, which makes the transplanting easier.
Then we found a good spot to re-plant the eggs—a bit farther back and tucked into the edge of a relatively flat sand dune. We dug a hole just like the one the mother had made with her hind flippers. For the turtle mother, it can take up to thirty minutes to dig her nest, but human hands made quick work of the task. Carefully we laid the eggs into the nest one on top of the other, excited by the possibility of each new turtle life.
In about 60 days, these babies will hatch and hopefully wiggle their way into the sea. And with any luck, maybe a couple of the females will make it back to this beach to lay their own eggs in about 20 years. Ghost crabs scurried across the beach, raccoons lurked in the nearby brush, a few plastic bottles and other trash lay at the edge of the dunes, and shrimpers plied the waters offshore—all these threats are evident to us and will make survival a huge challenge for the loggerhead babies. But we weren’t thinking about that as we happily placed sand on top of the eggs and then marked the nest’s new location with yellow stakes. The experts at Sea Island will be keeping tabs on the nests, waiting and watching for the new babies to emerge.
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We at Our Daily Planet have "adopted" one of these nests - the good folks at Sea Island will send us updates until the babies hatch. Stay tuned! If you want to “adopt” a loggerhead nest, contact the Sea Island Foundation.
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Turtle conservation on the Golden Isles of Georgia! Video: Rae Frey ODP
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 Climate Change
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Climate Change Tips Green Sea Turtle Gender Balance
Researchers have recently documented that climate change is having a drastic impact on the gender of green sea turtles in Australia near the Great Barrier Reef (GBR). A study in the journal Current Biology last winter found that because sand temperatures were higher during the incubation period for the eggs, they were getting more female hatchlings. The sex of the turtle is determined by the temperature of the sand while incubating rather than by genetics. The researchers found that there was a "moderate female sex bias (65%–69% female) in turtles originating from the cooler southern GBR nesting beaches, while turtles originating from warmer northern GBR nesting beaches were extremely female-biased (99.1% of juvenile, 99.8% of subadult, and 86.8% of adult-sized turtles)." And here is the real kicker -- the scientists projected that given these results and the twenty-year trend of rising female populations when combined with predicted temperature rise, that "complete feminization of this population is possible in the near future."
Why This Matters: The sex of most sea turtles is determined by sand temperature. This could be a global phenomenon if temperatures rise as expected more than 2.6 degrees over the coming decades. As a result, scientists predict high egg mortality and female-only offspring will eventually put these already threatened species at risk. There is some good news in the short run, though. The Washington Post reported that according to NOAA marine biologist and study co-author Michael Jensen, the overall turtle population might increase in the short run, as long as all those female turtles can find males to fertilize their eggs. “A few males can go a really long way. Male turtles mate more frequently" than female turtles do, Jensen said. So many good one-liners to insert here - but we will leave it there!
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 Sustainability
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Turtle Found Dead on Long Island Beach Had Ingested Plastic Bag
A juvenile leatherback sea turtle was found dead at Shinnecock East County Park in Southampton, New York last Friday, according to Rachel Bosworth of the Atlantic Marine Conservation Society. Bosworth believes it drowned due to plastics found in its intestines. Staff scientists performed a necropsy on Saturday morning and found a 13-gallon plastic bag, as well as smaller black garbage bags and food wrappers, in the animal’s gastrointestinal tract. “That could have led to the animal’s death,” Ms. Bosworth said on Tuesday. “The lungs looked collapsed as if the animal had drowned.” Marine pollution and trash is a problem for turtles and other marine wildlife along the resort towns on Long Island and the entire coastline for that matter. Last year, 14 of the 80 or so sea turtles helped by responders from the Atlantic Marine Conservation Society in New York died as a result of ingesting marine debris or suffering from entanglement.
Why This Matters: In populous tourist beaches with large numbers of summer visitors, it is more important than ever to be sure you pick up all your trash.
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People
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Interview of the Week: Breanna Ondich, Georgia Sea Turtle Center
ODP: What type of turtles are you working to protect here in coastal Georgia? Why are you going to such great lengths to conserve them?
BRE: The Georgia Sea Turtle Center works to rehabilitate, research, and educate about all our local turtle species, ranging from the terrestrial Eastern Box Turtle, and Gopher Tortoise to the aquatic Diamondback Terrapin and several species of sea turtles. The five sea turtles found in Georgia include the Loggerhead Sea Turtle, Kemp’s Ridley Sea Turtle, Green Sea Turtle, Leatherback Sea Turtle, and Hawksbill Sea Turtle. All sea turtle species are federally listed under the U.S. Endangered Species Act because their populations have seen a drastic decline over the past several decades.
ODP: What makes these turtles moms so remarkable? How do they nest?
BRE: The Loggerhead Sea Turtle is the most common sea turtle to crawl ashore on the beaches of Coastal Georgia under the cover of darkness to nest. These 200-300-pound moms will come up on the beach about four times in a single summer and spend several hours emerging from the surf, digging a two-foot hole above the high tide line, laying about 120 ping-pong-ball shaped eggs, camouflaging the area, and finally lumbering her way back to sea. These moms take 30-35 years before they are mature enough to do this, and will return to the same general area they were born every three years for as long as they live – which we think can be more than 90 years! We have been studying nesting sea turtles on Jekyll Island since 1958 but we still have much to learn.
ODP: What are the biggest threats they face today?
BRE: All sea turtles face a variety of natural threats from things like predators and disease, but the greatest threats today are those caused by humans. Across the globe, this can include illegal poaching of eggs and adults, ingestion of plastics, beachfront development, light pollution, entanglement in fishing gear, accidental capture by dredges and trawls, and being struck by boats. The top three threats in Coastal Georgia include fishing interactions, disease, and boat strikes.
ODP: How is climate change impacting them and how does it impact your work to conserve them?
BRE: Since sea turtles have temperature-dependent sex determination (the temperature of the air and sand dictate if the hatchlings develop into males or females) there is a concern that warmer temperatures will throw off the sex ratio of the population (warmer temperatures produce more females). Sea level rise will mean there is less high and dry beach habitat for nesting, reducing the success of nests since the eggs drown if submerged by an incoming tide. Warmer ocean temperatures will cause ocean acidification and the die-off of coral reefs, which provide major food sources for sea turtles and many other animals.
ODP: What can our readers do to help conserve turtles and the marine environment generally?
BRE: There are many simple ways to help sea turtles, no matter where you live. Protect the oceans by reducing your use of single-use plastics, such as plastic straws and plastic cutlery. If you visit a beach, be sure to fill in your holes and knock down your sand castles at the end of your visit as these are huge obstacles for nesting and hatchling sea turtles (and people too). White light from flashlights, street lights, and buildings can cause sea turtles to go the wrong way when trying to find the ocean, so be sure to close your blinds and use red lights on the beach if you go for a midnight stroll. Finally, you can donate and volunteer with any environmental organization like a sea turtle hospital and report any sick, injured, or displaced sea turtles by calling your state’s sea turtle hotline.
Thanks, Breanna, for making time for this interview during your busy turtle nesting season! You can read more about Breanna and her work on Jekyll Island here.
What You Can Do: To help conserve turtles on the Golden Isles of Georgia, click here. And if you are visiting the Georgia coast, we highly recommend a visit to the Georgia Sea Turtle Center on beautiful Jekyll Island. See our photos below!
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The Georgia Sea Turtle Center is a working hospital and rehab center for injured and ill turtles. Here the staff work to rehabilitate an injured loggerhead.
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 Oceans
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Off They Go Into the Wild Blue
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If you ever wondered what it is like for baby sea turtles trying to make it from the nest to the ocean, look no further! I (Monica) shot this video last December in Mexico near San Jose del Cabo. Watch these just-hatched baby sea turtles scoot into the surf at dusk!
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 Hero
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Hero of the Week: Jean Beasley, Executive Director of the Karen Beasley Sea Turtle Rescue and Rehabilitation Center
Karen Beasley, Jean’s daughter, organized the Topsail Turtle Project after seeing the critical need to protect sea turtle nests along the 16 miles of coastline on Topsail Island in North Carolina. The island is a haven for Sea Turtles -- residents and tourists help to preserve the turtle nesting grounds and also help as many as possible of the local turtle population survive and thrive. After Karen’s early death, the project continued under Jean’s guidance and care. Jean, along with a small group of volunteers, in 1996 was given the chance to care for an injured sea turtle named Lucky. Lucky’s journey from sickness to health proved that there was a need for a rehabilitation center in North Carolina for injured sea turtles. From their early beginnings from a crowded vacant lot in 1997 to their 13,000+ square-foot building in 2013, they have been able to treat hundreds of turtles, teach thousands of guests about marine conservation, and mentor the next generation of ocean stewards through their internship program and camps.
I (Rae) can speak from experience as a previous intern, everyone there works so hard -- especially Jean! Bad weather may slow them down, but Jean is a powerhouse that just doesn’t stop! Jean Beasley continues her conservation work today, continuously improving current operations, aiding research efforts, and spreading her message that “that every person can make a difference and that together we can change the world!” Jean Beasley was the recipient of the International Sea Turtle Society’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2017. She is truly a defender of the ocean and a sea turtle guardian.
“When we started our rehab work with sea turtles sixteen years ago, this was not so much on my radar, it was more about honoring my daughter and her work and the legacy that she left me, and about these animals that I had fallen in love with twenty years before. None of us ever planned to have a sea turtle hospital, it was an injured sea turtle that did it.” --Jean Beasley
What You Can Do: To learn more about the Karen Beasley Sea Turtle Rescue and Rehabilitation Center, click here.
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Have a great weekend! Thanks so much for reading. We love your comments and tips -- please keep them coming. Please keep sharing us with your friends and follow us on Twitter! We will see you bright and early on Monday morning!
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