Waties Island Sea Turtles: Sunday, September 3rd - Nest #5 Emerged, and a surprise by the jetty

Sunday, September 3, 2023

Sunday, September 3rd - Nest #5 Emerged, and a surprise by the jetty - Nest #11

Another great morning on Waties. I walked with the Sunday Volunteers since Erin took a well deserved long weekend off. We had a busy morning. There was lots of action at Nest #5. Classic Emergence hole, lots of tracks to the ocean. Those little ones had a long walk to the water and they had to go around or over large piles of wrack left from the storm. Nest #5 was laid on July 14th and emerged on Day 51. The inventory will be on Wednesday and announced via a separate email.

Classic emergence hole

Example of the piles of wrack.

These hatchlings were not alone on the beach, hopefully the Coyotes came after they dashed to the ocean.

Along with Coyote tracks, are those pesky Ghost Crabs


Who came first? The hatchling or the Coyote?

The Sunday Volunteers elected to walk up to the jetty, and happy they did - Mario discovered a wild or "Undetected Nest" behind the first row of rocks at the jetty. She laid right at the base of a small dune with vegetation on it. Unfortunately, the Coyotes found the nest and dug it up. We do know that the eggs had hatched, we don't know whether the hatchlings got to the water or did the Coyote's find them first. There were no tracks etc. The Sunday Volunteers did find 5 deceased hatchlings within the rocks of the jetty. When we find a wild nest, we have to do a few things differently than when we find a crawl with a body pit etc. We did take a flipper from one of the deceased hatchlings and this was used for the DNA sample. The other thing we do when a nest is dug up, we have to do the inventory at that time, we do not wait the customary three days. This nest had 62 hatched eggshells, 1 unhatched egg, 5 deceased hatchlings and zero live hatchlings. The nest had a 98.4 Hatched Success and 90.4 Emergence Success.

Hoping these hatchlings timed it with the high tide.