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