First off our thoughts are with the cities and people in the path of Hurricane Idalia and all of the people that will be helping them recover and rebuild.
We are fortunate here in PCB to have only experienced high surf overnight causing the waves to push up to high beach. Our surveyors assessed all nests this morning and found that any nest not in the dunes had some or a lot of washover. Some or all of the stakes washed away from some nest areas. We have restaked/repaired the nest markings that we could and will give all nests on our beach a full 80 days from when they were laid in case the water slows the incubation.
The sea turtle nests can handle some amounts of water but they can not tolerate inundation or sitting in water, that stops the development of the egg. We will continue to monitor the nests and expect some of them may still hatch. Therefore, we’ll continue to announce excavations of hatched nests as they are scheduled. As we excavate unhatched nests we’ll post those results as well as we know some of you have a vested interest in some particular nests.
We won’t know the full impact of the storm until the season is over (when the last nest has hatched or 80 days from when the last nest is laid) but we will continue to monitor and hope we get to add to our 2023 hatchling count. To date we have had 46 nest, with 20 having hatched producing 1700+ hatchlings!
