MAYPORT, Fla. – With sea turtle nesting season underway, advocates are encouraging beachgoers to protect the creatures.
Naval Station Mayport is preparing to have between 20 to 30 sea turtle nests by the time the nesting season ends in October, which it considers “average” compared to a record number of nestings and hatchings in 2023.
Currently, the beach on the base has 14 sea turtle nests, with a chance of that number doubling before the season ends.
Over the years, work continues to make the one-mile stretch of beach an inviting place for them to nest.
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Every sea turtle species is threatened and endangered.
Naval Station Mayport typically sees loggerheads, which is the most common species.
The beach already has one leatherback sea turtle this season, which it typically only sees every three or four years.
There is a chance a green sea turtle will appear in late July or early August, as Mayport only sees that kind of sea turtle once every two or three years.
Two projects last year on the beach are limiting the number of nests this time around.
The beach at Naval Station Mayport was a part of the $32 million beach renourishment project in 2024 to reinforce beaches dealing with erosion that were affected by hurricanes. About 9,000 “dump trucks worth of sand” were added to the beach in Mayport, which also helped cover hundreds of thousands of sea oats.
The Army Corps of Engineers also did a beneficial reuse project where it added sand on the beach to give more space for sea turtles to nest and widen the beach.
Heather Hahn, Naval Station Mayport’s environmental programs director, said some of the changes lead sea turtles to consider nesting somewhere else temporarily.
“With renourished beaches, there are a couple of different hypotheses as to why they did not nest as much on those beaches,” she said. “It could just be that they come up onto the beach and it just feels different to them, or the slope is wrong or the sand is not right.”
Hahn said there is a list of things people can do to help protect sea turtles.
“[Keep beaches] clean, dark and flat,” Hahn said. “The best thing you can do to make a beach a good beach for nesting sea turtles is when you go to the beach, make sure that everything you bring to the beach you take off the beach. If you see trash, pick it up because it is really easy for an adult female nesting on this beach to hit a left chair or something else left on the beach, and just turn around and decide that she cannot nest there.”
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A significant way to help sea turtles make their way to the ocean after they hatch is to either limit light or not have a light that is too bright.
Hahn said Mayport has special yellow/amber colored lighting and lights that are no more than 12 feet high that help not to disorient the sea turtles.
“If there’s a big bright light on the inland side or on the landward side, [sea turtles] might orient toward that light and travel into the dunes instead of heading toward the moon and the stars, and heading back out into the ocean,” she said. “This can lead to dehydration. They can get trapped, and sometimes they can end up on roads and would get hit by cars.”
Hahn said even though this year is expected to be average in the amount of sea turtle nests, the numbers are still really good compared to what it was seeing about 10 years ago.
During 2016 and 2017, Hahn said numbers were half of what they are now.
