leatherbacks's blog

Tonight we encountered on leatherback turtle as she was laying eggs south of the Juno Beach fishing pier. She was a turtle we had tagged during the 2001 season - seven long years ago! Lucy has been nesting pretty regularly since then and she was last seen here during the 2006 season.

I do think that the season is now winding down pretty rapidly and this next weekend will likely be our last survey day. We are expecting quite a few turtles this week and I hope they show up. I like to say goodbye to them before they head off to colder waters up north.

As Sara and I are ending the night here in the office, we are contemplating the components of the Keystone Party Mix on the desk. One of the snacks listed on the bag "Midgee" is listed among the snack favorites including cheese curls, BBQ corn chips and tortilla chips. What could midgee be?? An google search comes up without any real results for this odd snack. Anybody out there know what it is?

Last night there was only one leatherback that showed up here along the beach. She was a tiny little girl and we found her nesting at about 10pm near the Seminole Golf Course. Her carapace (top "shell") is only 133 centimeters in length which ranks as one of the smallest turtles we have encountered. I sort of thought she looked like a big loggerhead when I first saw her.

The loggerhead turtles are arriving on the beach in pretty good numbers now with about 40 crawls each night. As of last night, there are 147 loggerhead and 49 leatherback nests here on Juno Beach. On the other beaches we monitor each morning (Jupiter/Carlin and Tequesta), the numbers are pretty similar.

No leatherbacks have been spotted tonight along Juno Beach and the rest of our survey area. It is not that boring out there since the loggerheads are starting to nest in pretty good numbers now. Sara and Niki are out there now and have reported about 15 loggerhead nests so far.

Last night we found one turtle nesting right here near the Marinelife Center. Her name is Tuga and she is named after the leatherback turtle on the Go Diego Go show for kids. Tuga attempted to nest on Singer Island the night before, but she spent a lot of time and effort on the beach blocked by chairs near the Hilton hotel. They have many cabana chairs that are left on the beach each night and the chairs often block nesting turtle from accessing the high beach. Tuga probably spent an hour walking back and forth between the chairs before giving up and heading back to the ocean. She laid a good nest less than 24 hours later here right by our office!

Last night, Sandy had a very exciting recapture on the south end of Singer Island (Palm Beach Shores)
I was in the office when she called to say she found her first leatherback turtle of the season. She told me the turtle’s name, and I quickly looked her up in our database and told her who it was. After a few minutes of chatting about her first turtle, I realized that it was Venus! We all thought that we would never see Venus again after her last encounter in 2006.

Venus had been hit by a large boat just prior to nesting that season and it was very hard for us to watch her crawl up and down the beach and throw as much sand as she did. The boat had severely lacerated her carapace and the wound was bleeding and full of sand and debris. She seemed to put a lot of effort into making her nests, even though she was bleeding from her cracked open carapace. Many of us that observed her, really thought that there was little chance for her to survive her terrible injuries.

Despite the cold weather, the turtles are nesting in pretty good numbers. Last night, we found three turtles nesting along the south end of the beach. Two of them were turtles that nested this season and this is likely their third set of nests this season. We did not see either of them ten days ago. The other turtle was Eve. She nested pretty regularly during the 2006 season and we expect to see her a bunch this year.

On Saturday night, we found a new leatherback nesting along Jupiter Beach. She was named "Tuga" after a character on Go Diego Go.
Tuga is described as a "heroic Spanish-speaking sea turtle. An exceptionally strong swimmer, she can zip Diego through the water on her shell or protect her friends from stinging jellyfish!"

Last night we had two turtles. One of them was a new untagged girl and the second was a turtle tagged way back in 2002. Hillary is her name, and she has nested every other year since 2002. I did not get to see any turtles nesting because I was stuck up near the Jupiter Inlet monitoring a beach restoration project. There is a crew working 24 hours a day to add sand to the eroded section of beach a few hundred meters south of the inlet. We make sure that the turtles and their nests are protected from the equipment that operates all night. Check out the webcam image of the project here: www

We have begun the 2008 leatherback research season here on the beaches of northern Palm Beach County! This year we should be able to completely survey the whole stretch of beach between the Lake Worth Inlet and the Jupiter Inlet.

Turtle nesting season has begun here along Juno Beach! As of this morning, we have recorded four leatherback nests.
The season did start off very early this year with a nest recorded in Boca Raton on February 12th. I am pretty sure that the nest may be the earliest nest ever recorded in the state! We are expecting an average # of turtles and nests this year, but we should know better in two weeks or so.

We will probably begin our nightly surveys in a few days to encounter nesting turtles. Stay tuned!

The 2007 nesting season has finally come to an end. As of today, there is only one green turtle nest left here on Juno Beach and I expect it should hatch any night now.
This was another record setting year for leatherbacks with thirty more nests recorded than the 2001 season. A graph of the nesting trend can be viewed under the research section of this site.
All of us were extremely busy this season and we did not have much time to keep this site updated. I am very sorry for that and we will certainly do a better job next season!

Why were we so busy? Well, this year the Loggerhead Marinelife Center took on a much larger monitoring project. We developed a partnership with an engineering firm - Taylor Engineering and an environmental consulting firm - Ecological Associates to conduct turtle monitoring on a much longer survey area than in the past. The new group worked each morning (and often well into the afternoon!) along the beach from John D. MacArthur State Park all the way north to the Palm Beach/Martin County line. This area encompasses some of the most dense sea turtle nesting in the United States and we were very busy. Over the course of the season we documented more than 17,000 sea turtle crawls along the beach, dug up more than 1000 nests to assess the productivity of all of those turtles.

The number of nests here on Juno Beach continues to climb. I think that we will beat the all time record of leatherback nests of 128 by the end of this upcoming weekend. Check out the graph below.