Lindsey Flynn walks the Pinellas beaches as the sun rises over the Gulf of Mexico almost every morning from April 15 to Oct. 31. Yet even as the sky turns to pretty pastels, she keeps her eyes dutifully trained on the sand.
She is searching for sea turtle tracks.
She scans the ground for divots from sea turtle flippers, leaving her clues as to where they laid their eggs then carefully hid them, packing sand on top of the nest as camouflage.
Flynn hopes she finds the nests before predators do — animal or human.
Most sea turtles nest at night, so Flynn says dawn is the best time to identify sea turtle nests before anyone else arrives at the beach. Her alarm sounds at 3 a.m. each day and she’s at the beach by 5 a.m.
Members of her 25-person team patrol almost 21 miles of beach from Dunedin to Treasure Island. Flynn leads Clearwater Marine Aquarium’s Sea Turtle Conservation Team, which finds, marks, monitors and collects data on sea turtle nests.
After the team identifies a nest, they rope it off using stakes and brightly colored tape.
When a member of the team checked on a marked Atlantic loggerhead nest on Indian Rocks Beach on June 5, they found a man crawling under the tape and disturbing the nest.
The team member called the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office at about 7 a.m. and reported the man harassing a sea turtle’s habitat, according to an arrest affidavit.
Upon arriving at the scene, deputies found an intoxicated man sleeping on the beach. He admitted to crawling under the enclosed area and disrupting the sand around the nest, but did not explain why, the affidavit states.
The man was arrested and charged with a third-degree felony for violating Florida’s Marine Turtle Protection Act, meaning he could face up to five years in prison and a fine of up to $5,000.
Both state and federal law protect sea turtles and their nests. Atlantic loggerhead turtles are an endangered species, meaning the Endangered Species Act protects them at the federal level.
Florida law includes extra defenses for sea turtles, with the Marine Turtle Protection Act making the selling, killing, harassing or disturbing of a sea turtle, its eggs or its nest a felony.
This case marks the first time this year that someone has been charged with disturbing a sea turtle’s nest in Pinellas County, sheriff’s office spokesperson David Brenn said.
However, people damage turtle nests more often than they get caught.
David Godfrey, executive director of Florida-based nonprofit Sea Turtle Conservancy, said humans are the primary reason sea turtles face extinction. People hunt turtles to harvest the meat, eat the eggs or sell the shells, Godfrey said.
Sea turtles are particularly vulnerable to extinction because they are slow to mature — it takes up to 30 years for a sea turtle to be able to lay eggs, Godfrey said. Once they do, few survive to adulthood. A common saying claims only 1 out of every 1,000 hatchlings become adults, but Godfrey said he believes the number may be closer to 1 in 10,000.
“We are harvesting them to death,” Godfrey said.
While Brenn said deputies only observed a disturbance to the sand covering the Indian Rocks Beach nest and not to the eggs themselves, the baby turtles could still be harmed. Godfrey said whether the eggs are damaged depends on their phase of incubation.
When a turtle first lays its eggs, it digs an egg chamber deep in the ground and covers it with firmly packed sand, Godfrey said. During this phase, the eggs are secure. As the eggs incubate and the hatchlings begin to emerge, they move around within the egg chamber and gradually inch closer to the surface.
“There comes a point at which the hatchlings are very vulnerable to disturbance and to being crushed because they’re right below the surface,” Godfrey said. “A human being laying or stepping or rolling around on top of the nest absolutely could harm or kill them. Walking through where there’s a nest that is near the point they’re about to emerge would be deadly for the hatchlings.”
In this case, the man disturbed the nest of an Atlantic loggerhead turtle — a species Godfrey says is especially important to protect in Florida.
According to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, Florida is home to about 90% of all loggerhead nests in the world, giving the state a critical role in the preservation of the endangered species.
“It’s not just important to keep Florida a safe place for loggerhead nesting, it’s essential,” Godfrey said. “Our protection of loggerheads in Florida is what this species is going to depend on to survive.”
Sea turtle survival requires human awareness, Godfrey said. From sticking a beach umbrella into a nest to a child digging up eggs while building a sandcastle, Godfrey said accidents cost sea turtle lives all the time.
“We try to raise awareness, we try to properly mark where these nests are so people can avoid the area and let the animal reproduce successfully,” Godfrey said.
Lynn and her team members do their part every day by patrolling beaches despite excruciatingly early wake-ups and unpredictable Florida weather. All the early mornings feel worth it when they see the tangible change their work creates, Lynn said.
“We’ve talked to people about how white artificial light can negatively impact turtles and our residents responded and asked their cities to change their street lights for the good of sea turtles,” Flynn said. “To have that impact directly on turtles and the community are the two biggest motivators for us.”
Despite the commitment that keeps them showing up every morning, Lynn and her team cannot keep watch over every sea turtle nest 24 hours a day. One of the biggest things the public can do to save the turtles, Lynn said, is to speak up when they see someone harassing a turtle or its nest.
“We encourage anybody, even members of the public, who see an individual interacting with a marine turtle be it an adult that is nesting, a distressed turtle ashore, a nest or a crawl track, to call the police right away,” Flynn said. “That is against the law and law enforcement needs to come out and intervene as quickly as possible.”
