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MELBOURNE, FLORIDA -- High ocean waves caused by Hurricane Floyd's brush with Florida's east coast this week washed out thousands of sea turtle nests in and around the Archie Carr National Wildlife Refuge, resulting in the deaths of as many as 50,000 to 100,000 hatchling sea turtles, according to state sea turtle specialists.
“A lot of turtle nests are gone,” said Dr. Blair Witherington, a biologist with the state's Marine Research Institute in Melbourne Beach. “After Floyd passed, I walked part of the beach in the refuge and saw the remains of a lot of eggs and hatchlings that had been washed out of nests.”
From June to August each year, the beaches in and around the Archie Carr National Wildlife Refuge host thousands of nesting loggerhead and green sea turtles. The refuge is the site of the largest nesting congregation of threatened loggerhead sea turtles in the Western Hemisphere and is the single most important nesting site in the continental U.S. for endangered green turtles. This year more than 21,000 loggerhead nests were counted in the refuge, and about 85% of those nests had hatched before Hurricane Floyd began its march along Florida's east coast. That left about 3,000 sea turtle nests vulnerable to Floyd's wrath. Each sea turtle nest can contain more than 100 eggs.
Witherington said the single most important factor contributing to which nests survived Hurricane Floyd and which didn't was the placement of nests on the beach. “Many of those nests that were deposited high up near the dunes will survive,” he said. “Those that were lower were washed out or flooded and won't survive.”
Witherington makes this distinction because the best location for sea turtles to nest to keep their eggs safe from storms-- high up on the beach near the dunes -- is also where many beachside residents want to build sea walls to protect their property from beach erosion.
Gary Appelson, advocacy coordinator for Caribbean Conservation Corporation's (CCC) Sea Turtle Survival League Program, said this sets up a conflict between humans and endangered sea turtles.
“When people build homes on Florida's beaches, they are taking a tremendous risk of losing their property to hurricanes,” Appelson said. “Unfortunately many of these people, instead of living further back from the beach, attempt to hold back the ocean by building sea walls in front of their property on the very habitat that hatchling sea turtles need to survive large storms like Floyd. Sea turtles become penned between the ocean and sea walls, and the results can be disastrous for the hatchlings.”
The Archie Carr National Wildlife Refuge was established in 1989 to help resolve some of the conflicts between turtles and people through the purchase of property from willing sellers that now preserves prime nesting habitat for the turtles. Unfortunately, not all of the parcels that have been designated for purchase have been saved due to a lack of funding, mainly from the federal government.
Even now Congress is poised to deal a crippling blow to current Carr Refuge land conservation efforts by public and private agencies in Florida by stripping nearly $3 million dollars in funding from the 2000 Federal Budget. The money would have gone towards the acquisition of key parcels in the central portion of the refuge.
“The loss of this money is very disturbing,” said Appelson. “Development is occuring so quickly in and around the refuge that we are in a race against time to buy and preserve critical sea turtle nesting habitat. If we don't conserve this land, conflicts between turtles and people will continue to escalate, and we will lose our nation's largest nesting population of sea turtles forever.”
Also, Appelson said, Florida must do more to halt the proliferation of often unnecessary sea walls along Florida's coastlines. Sea walls prevent turtles from nesting by destroying nesting habitat and also contribute to further beach erosion, causing beach loss for people as well as turtles. The hurricane underscores the need to protect as much nesting habitat as possible from development. Only because Hurricane Floyd arrived towards the end of sea turtle nesting season were the deaths of tens of thousands of additional hatchlings prevented.
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