Siesta Key welcomes newest visitors

This year’s turtle-nesting season on Siesta Key is off to a surprising start.

It’s not the recorded number of nests and false crawls, three each, which remain in line with the previous year’s data for the first week of the season.

It’s one turtle’s nesting habits, which were on display for onlookers May 1.

Mote Marine Laboratory enlists 350 volunteers and four staff members for daily beach patrols from Longboat Key to Venice to gather data. But turtle trackers rarely get the opportunity to observe a sea turtle in the act of digging a nest and laying its roughly 100 eggs, because turtles generally nest at night.

However, this year some beachgoers and members of Mote’s turtle patrol witnessed a loggerhead turtle finish nesting at approximately 7 a.m. May 1, said Mote senior biologist Kristen Mazzarella.

There are a variety of reasons the turtle eschewed its normal nesting habits, including some that would indicate questionable character traits. Mazzarella explained that it could have reached the shoreline in the early hours of the morning or struggled to find an acceptable spot to dig the 1-foot-deep nest — making the mother late or picky.

But, there is no way to determine the actual cause.

“(Different sea turtles) are just like people with different personalities,” Mazzarella said. “They just make different choices.”

Turtle tracks are the key to spotting false crawls, which happen when a sea turtle emerges from surf and becomes disoriented and returns to the sea without nesting.

Disorientation can happen when beach furniture or sandcastles and trenches create obstacles or shoreline lights cause visual confusion.

At the monthly Siesta Key Association meeting Monday, May 7, Mote Marine Laboratory volunteer Tommy Vaughn-Cooper gave a brief demonstration about what to expect during this season on Siesta Key.

Although the lowest nesting numbers were recorded in 2003, Vaughn-Cooper said, “We’ve been on an upward trend for nests.”

The hypothetical battle of the turtle sexes will likely result in more females emerging from nests towards the south end of Siesta Key on Turtle Beach and males dominating the north. It’s all in the sand, Vaughn-Cooper explained.

The temperature of the nest determines a sea turtle’s sex, so the dark sands of Turtle Beach will yield a different sex ratio than the light sand of the morthern beach.

“Remember: hot mommas and cool daddies,” she said.