Panama City Beach Turtle Watch

🥁🐢Drum roll please….Nest 1 was found by morning surveyors today and has been marked by volunteers for protection! In the last week, we found three false crawls, where the turtle came onto the beach but didn’t nest, now we have our first 2025 Nest!

A loggerhead chose our beach overnight to lay her nest and our surveyors and volunteers put their FWC and local training to work to identify the crawl and mark it for protection. Per our permit guidelines, we do not post the locations of our nests. If you happen to see a marked nest on the beach, please refrain from entering the area so the egg chamber can stay well protected for the next 60-70 days. That is the average incubation time here on our beach and it is all dependent on various environmental factors. We commonly find our first nest around this time in May so we are right on track and hope to be finding many more nests over the next few months.

If you encounter a sea turtle on the sandy beach at night, please refrain from using flash photography, use no lights at all (causes disorientation), avoid her track and any disturbed sandy areas, observe from the back side of the turtle from a distance and contact PCB Police non-emergency at 850-233-5000. They will contact our on call volunteers to respond and protect the turtle and the nest she lays.

Remember, everyone can do their part leaving our beaches clean, dark and flat!

Our surveyors and volunteers have been patiently waiting for the sea turtles to arrive on our sandy beaches here in PCB. This morning one of our surveyors found a loggerhead crawl, a false crawl. The turtle emerged from the water but after checking out the area she returned to the water. We hope she will return somewhere along our beach tonight and this time successfully nest. Our volunteers and surveyors are all ready to get our first 2025 nest under our belt.

If you encounter a sea turtle on the sandy beach, stay behind her from a distance, don’t use any light (it dazes and disorients them) and contact us via PCB police non-emergency or our Turtle Watch hotline number. We’ll have our volunteers respond asap to help protect her and her nest.

PS that sargassum that is currently floating nearby and washing ashore, it is the habitat hatchling sea turtles are looking for once they hatch and enter the Gulf. In the Gulf, it provides food and protection for the hatchlings.

Panama City Beach Turtle Watch is entering it’s 35 season (May 1 – October 31) of protecting nesting and hatching sea turtles, under a state issued permit by FWC.

We patrol 18 miles of beach from St Andrews State Park to Camp Helen State Park. We are a non-profit organization with ATV surveyors that patrol the beaches just before sunrise looking for fresh sea turtle crawls as most nesting (and hatching) activity occurs overnight. When they find a crawl, the surveyor determines if it is a nest and if so, they contact one of our volunteers that have been through FWC and local training on how to properly identify the characteristics of the crawl and nest and mark it for protection. It takes about 2 months on our beaches for the eggs to incubate, hatch and emerge. At which time we also have volunteers checking nightly for disoriented hatchlings as artificial lighting is the number one threat to hatchling sea turtles. If disoriented hatchlings are found, they are collected and placed into the Gulf by volunteers. Volunteers then excavate the nest 3-4 days following the hatch to assess the nest contents. Throughout the season, we are gathering data and reporting it to FWC as part of their efforts to determine nesting trends and assessing the population.

While the general public may not be directly authorized to specifically help with the nest protection that our program performs, there are ways to help. Everyone can keep our beaches clean, dark and flat. Leave No Trace (local ordinance) when you leave the beach for the day (sundown to sunup), remove everything and dispose of trash properly. Keep it dark (local lighting ordinance for beachfront properties), turn off exterior lights, close your curtains, avoid using white light while on the beach (if necessary, use a red LED flashlight) and never use flash photography if you encounter a sea turtle on the beach. Lastly, leave the beaches flat, avoid leaving holes and knock down your sand castles. Doing all of this will help sea turtles avoid expending wasted energy. They are designed for the water so the fewer obstacles they face on the beach the better chance they have for nesting or hatching and then returning to the water.

The most common species nesting on PCB is the loggerhead (a threatened species), along with some greens and the occasional leatherback. We invite the everyone to follow here on our website http://turtlewatch.org or Facebook page, Panama City Beach Turtle Watch, for information throughout this season. We have closed our volunteer application process for the season but invite any locals or visitors to follow our events on Facebook. Starting mid-July, we begin announcing excavations, a chance for anyone in the area to come and watch our volunteers in action and get a chance to see the contents of a hatched nest.

If you see a sea turtle on the sandy beach, keep your distance, avoid using any light and contact us via Facebook or through PCB Police’s non-emergency phone number and they will reach out to our volunteers.

Our 2024 season has officially come to a close as we wrapped up all activities involved in operating under our FWC issued marine turtle permits.

We’d like to thank all of our surveyors, volunteers, local agencies, residents and visitors who played a role in the protection of the Loggerhead sea turtles in Panama City Beach, FL during our 2024 season.

We had 34 loggerhead nests on the beach this season stretching from our eastern to western boundaries. Volunteers witnessed nesting loggerheads and were able to apply passive tags on four nesting loggerheads! We endured nest impacts (development stopped/eggs washed out) from tropical storm Alberto and from hurricanes Francine and Helene that made landfall in other areas of the Gulf coast. We appreciate the help from our local police, code enforcement and our local lifeguards. We enjoyed the opportunity to share information about our program and sea turtles at local events, schools and excavations.

Below we have recapped some of our 2024 season highlights. We look forward to being ready to start our season again May 1, 2025!

All work/photos conducted under MTP-038, MTP-271, MTP-286

Today we celebrated our 2024 Panama City Beach Turtle Watch team. Our 2024 team dedicated many hours this season to help protect sea turtles and they deserve to be celebrated! A special thank you to Pompano Joe’s Panama City Beach for allowing us to celebrate our 2024 season as we gathered to enjoy drinks, appetizers, a great view and socializing.

PS Be sure to stop by and try one of Pompano Joe’s Turtle Brews or grab one of their t-shirts as they are a great partner with making a donation to our program yearly from those sales.

As we prepare to wrap up our season, we wanted to offer a chance for those of you unable to purchase merchandise in person this season a chance to purchase online!
Online PCB Turtle Watch merchandise sales are now available through Sunday October 13, 2024 (or when supplies/sizes are depleted)!

Many of you have asked how you can purchase one of our Turtle Watch t-shirts, hats/visors or reusable bags online and have it shipped. Well now is your chance!
For a limited time between now and Sunday October 13, 2024 you can place your order and we will fulfill those orders first come, first serve.

Please see the order form for more information.

Don’t miss your chance, this is a one time opportunity as we wrap up our 2024 season! We appreciate your support this season🐢

Our education outreach team partnered with Gulf World Marine Institute to host an outreach session for Girl Scout Troop 103 from Tallahassee. They were visiting PCB to learn about sea turtles and they all have a strong affinity for marine life (they have toured other marine life facilities). During this visit, they earned their Water Badge after seeing our educational specimens, hearing about our program and sea turtle species common to this area. They also observed the GWMI rehabilitation activities for sea turtles including treatments being performed on a loggerhead patient. We are inspired by the passion this group of ladies had for marine life and who knows, maybe they will one day be professionals in the field or volunteers themselves!

PCB Turtle Watch has now completed their remake of the Disney movie “Holes”.  We had 8 nests that suffered from washover and/or accretion from Tropical Storm Alberto mid June that stopped the development of the eggs.  None of these nests showed signs of having hatched so as each one reached day 80 from being laid they were excavated to locate and count the number of eggs.  These excavations were not announced to the public and our lead excavator enticed volunteers to attend under the guise of a free boot camp, focused on an upper body workout.  Some of these nests had over 3 feet of accretion that had to be moved just to reach the original beach level to then dig another 2 foot looking for the eggs.  After many hours of moving many cubic yards of sand, digging out completely buried nest stakes and caution/survey tape and filling the holes back in, we have now excavated all of these failed nests.  We appreciate the hours and physical effort put forth by every one of our volunteers that helped us during these excavations.  We always appreciate our volunteers but to willingly sign up night after night for these excavations receives an extra special Thank You!

Excavation of these 8 nests revealed 506 unhatched eggs that showed little to no development. Sea turtles can nest 3-7 times in a season so while these nests weren’t successful, we’d like to think other nests laid by these females have or will have much better results this season. Stay up to date on total number of nests hatched and hatchings that have emerged here on our website, we are at over 1600 hatchlings so far this season!

Activities performed under MTP-038

Our volunteers have stayed busy the last week with nests hatching every few days, around incubation day 55. Many hatchlings have been disoriented requiring they be recovered and released on a darker part of our beach. After a nest hatches, an excavation is scheduled to assess the nest contents with the excavation and results being announced on Facebook.

This week we will reach the day 80 mark for several nests that were impacted by Tropical Storm Alberto. Three of these nests suffered a good deal of wash over due to high surf and 2-3 foot of additional sand being placed on the nest. Others had washout or washover that likely stopped the development of the eggs. Volunteers will schedule private excavations of these nests to try to locate the eggs to at least determine how many had been laid. These nests are numbered in the teens, so we hope that those females returned weeks later here in the Panhandle to lay some other nests that are having better hatch success.

We appreciate all of the hours our volunteers are spending now on hatching monitoring, recovery and excavations!

We are well into our hatching season with nest 23 having recently hatched!

We continue checking the beach in the mornings for new nests but have not had any recently and remain at 34 nests having been marked for protection this season. On the flip side we are having nests hatch every couple of days at this point, commonly occurring overnight. Our volunteers have been trained by FWC on rescue and recovery of disoriented hatchlings. We have had a couple of nests where the hatchlings made it to the water unassisted but we have had many more nests hatch where the hatchlings have been disoriented and rescued and released that same evening by volunteers. Our volunteers then excavate the nest 3-4 days after a hatch to determine the hatch success based on the nest contents which will then be reported to FWC. We announce public excavations via our Facebook page Events section and we stream on Panama City Beach Turtle Watch Facebook or post videos/photos as a way to keep everyone updated on the results so stay tuned there for those details. We do have several nests that experienced washover and sand accretion that may have slowed or stopped development of the eggs. We will conduct private excavations of those when the time comes. In the meantime we’ll stay busy with the remaining non-washed over nests!

Everyone can do their part in by leaving the beaches clean, dark and flat. Every little bit can help and make a difference for this protected species.