Giving Compass' Take:
- Emily Jones details the decades-long process of understanding how climate change is impacting sea turtles and its implications for conservation efforts.
- How can donors and funders provide the long-term support needed to ensure research on sea turtle populations and conservation continues across decades?
- Learn more about key climate justice issues and how you can help.
- Search our Guide to Good for nonprofits focused on climate justice in your area.
What is Giving Compass?
We connect donors to learning resources and ways to support community-led solutions. Learn more about us.
In the middle of a steamy July night on the Wassaw Island beach, near Savannah, Georgia, volunteer Gabi Steinbach plunged her arm shoulder-deep in the sand to reach a loggerhead sea turtle nest that hatched five days before. She pulled out the remaining eggshells, and fellow volunteer Sheri Pittman sorted and counted them by the light of the moon and a red-tinted headlamp. Some fragments are too small to count, but Pittman uses the larger pieces to determine how many hatchlings made it out of this nest, contributing to sea turtle conservation efforts.
“Any eggshell that is over 50 percent counts as a hatched egg,” explained Kristen Zemaitis, who directed a team of volunteers with the Caretta Research Project. The team also investigated the unhatched eggs for signs of development. “Then we will categorize that by different stages to see the percentage of development in each egg.”
All that information tells the story of this nest, one that the Caretta team has been following for about two months since an adult turtle crawled up on the beach, dug a hole with her flippers, and laid these eggs. Whenever possible, these volunteer teams catalog the nesting mother as well, taking measurements and recording her tag number if she has one.
It’s an all-night, all-summer effort.
The Wassaw Island data makes up part of a vast mosaic of information collected by volunteers along all of Georgia’s 100-mile coastline, as well as the coasts of Florida, the Carolinas, and Virginia. Patrolling the beaches overnight or at dawn, they inventory thousands of sea turtle nests each year. Volunteers amass reams of data about nest locations, the number of hatchlings, the nest success rates, the details of the mother, and more.
The sea turtle conservation and data-gathering effort began in the 1960s on just a couple of Georgia’s barrier islands. That led to successful attempts in the late 1980s and early 1990s to protect sea turtle adults from shrimping nets and nests from human interference.
Read the full article about sea turtle conservation by Emily Jones at Grist.