100,000 Turtles

Summer is the busy season on St. Catherines Island, Ga. But, it’s not tourists in flip-flops carrying beach chairs and coolers that converge on this remote island every year. It is scientists, college professors, graduate students and teachers that board a boat for the only way on or off the island, ready for weeks of work and study focused on saving a creature in such jeopardy that two federal agencies want it considered for a spot on the endangered species list.

This summer trek of scholars and students with the common goal of saving loggerhead sea turtle nests was the vision of a Georgia Southern faculty member 20 years ago. Since that time, more than 100,000 baby loggerheads have been safely hatched, hundreds of school teachers have learned hands-on lessons to take back to their classrooms, and at least one student’s life ambition has been changed.

The St. Catherines Island Sea Turtle Project was the brainchild of Georgia Southern geology professor emeritus Gale Bishop. Bishop and his colleague Nancy Brannen Marsh envisioned an experience where college professors, graduate students, and kindergarten through 12th-grade teachers would spend time together studying – and hopefully saving – loggerhead sea turtles. A favorite spot for nesting sea turtles, and free from the interference of development or large groups of people on the beach, St. Catherines Island proved to be the ideal location for the intense teaching, research and service experience. And the idea came at a crucial time for the sea turtles.

“In 1991, sea turtles in general and sea turtles in Georgia had just become recognized as being severely threatened and endangered,” Bishop remembers. “Populations around the world were in rapid decline and those nesting in Georgia were declining at a rate of about two percent a year. The one place we could have an immediate impact was in protecting sea turtle nests and increasing the production of hatchlings in Georgia.”

While retired from Georgia Southern, Bishop is still the program director and every summer he returns to St. Catherines. He is often up at first light, canvassing 18 kilometers of beach a day with teams collecting data and keeping careful records of the successes – and failures – of sea turtle nests around the island. Like many islands, St. Catherines is continually being changed by erosion – which also endangers the already tenuous sea turtle nests. Relocating the nests away from the threat of the rising ocean is a major part of the project’s conservation efforts. Team members use a method devised on St. Catherines to gently find the nests, which are so fragile that one improper move can easily destroy the loggerhead eggs.

“This program promotes a safe way of validating turtle nests without losing eggs to ‘probing,'” said Georgia Southern geology professor and St. Catherines Island Sea Turtle Program member Kelly Vance. “I was shocked, when I followed the nesting data on the seaturtle.org site last year, and saw the number of egg losses from probing soft sand with a rod. We teach a technique developed by Gale and Nancy that utilizes fundamental geologic principles of cross-cutting relationships and superposition to locate the egg chamber by gently scraping away thin layers of sand to identify it.”

Georgia high school teacher Bob Willis remembers looking for nests with Bishop.

“He asked me to dig a sea turtle nest during my second experience on the island,” Willis recalls. “I studied the nest carefully to try to find the egg chamber and slowly began digging… and digging… and digging. After I had cleared a couple of square meters of beach, Dr. Bishop casually pointed with his toe to a spot on the sand and asked me to try there. Within minutes the egg chamber was open and the eggs were clearly visible. There is nothing like the value of experience to make field work easier!”

After endangered nests are uncovered, the delicate task of moving them begins.

“Nests are relocated into natural areas that are being used by loggerhead sea turtles for their nests,” said Bishop. “We usually relocate approximately 60 percent of our nests, more in the latter part of the season when the storms of September are likely to impact the nests.”

Then, the wait begins.

Both Bishop and Vance say even scientists who have watched sea turtles hatch for years often tear up when the first hatchlings of the season emerge.

“Unlike farming, manufacturing, or mining, once a nest is deposited it is out of sight and underground,” Bishop explains. “We can’t see the fruit of our work until those first hatchlings emerge.”

That first sight of hatchlings cracking their way out of their egg shells and slowly crawling to the sea was enough to make one Georgia Southern student change her life’s course.

“My first experience with a sea turtle hatchling was on St. Catherines in the summer of 1999 during a nest excavation. Examining that hatchling and thinking of the seemingly insurmountable obstacles it would face throughout the course of its life changed my career path,” said veterinarian Kimberly Stewart, who is now the director of the St. Kitts Sea Turtle Monitoring Network. “I had always wanted to be a large animal veterinarian, but I knew at that point I really wanted to work with sea turtles. I guess it is still large animal medicine in a sense, as the sea turtles I work with now are nesting leatherback females and an average of 800 pounds!”

As a scientist, Bishop is trained to keep meticulous records. He said 223 K-12 teachers have participated in the program, taking their lesson and passion for the conservation of loggerhead sea turtles to 270,277 school children. He also said the program has watched 132,398 sea turtle hatchlings make it safely out to sea.

For the small number of those hatchlings that survive their early years in the sea, it will take anywhere from 20 to 30 years for them to reach their reproductive age. Scientists are tracking loggerheads and know many of them return to the same beaches where they were born to lay their own eggs. Which means soon, Gale Bishop may be re-locating a second generation of loggerhead sea turtle nests – and watching the children of one of the earliest sea turtles he saved on St. Catherines hatch from an egg and slowly make its way out to sea.

–Betsy Nolen