It wasn’t as booming as last year, but monitoring groups say the 2020 season was another strong one for sea turtle nesting in Palm Beach County.

Experts at Loggerhead Marinelife Center in Juno Beach and Gumbo Limbo Nature Center in Boca Raton reported what they described as pretty good years for the local nesting populations of loggerhead, leatherback and green sea turtles. Both facilities reported record-setting years in 2019.

Along 9.5 miles of beachfront in northern Palm Beach County, Loggerhead Marinelife counted 16,935 nests this season. Of that total, there were roughly 13,059 loggerhead nests, 3,590 green sea turtle nests and 286 leatherback nests.

That’s good for the third-most nests per season on record, said Justin Perrault, the center’s director of research. Loggerhead has been monitoring the beach in north county since 1979, though standardized surveys didn’t start until 2000, Perrault said. Sea turtle nesting season in Palm Beach County runs from March to the end of October.

“We had a really good year,” Perrault said. “I think it was surprising overall. Not really many concerns.”

Rangers and volunteers counted 2,504 nests this season at MacArthur Beach State Park in North Palm Beach, down from 3,057 last year but a number the Friends of MacArthur Beach State Park still considers good.

Loggerhead Marinelife Center figures its nests translated into about 900,000 hatchlings, Perrault said. One nest was even laid in late October, Perrault said, but he doesn’t expect the final total to change much.

In south county, Gumbo Limbo counted 901 nests this season, good for about 46,000 hatchlings.

Gumbo Limbo’s sea turtle conservation coordinator, David Anderson, said the nesting total is above average. He was particularly encouraged by the number of green sea turtle nests this year — 132, not a terribly steep drop-off from last year’s record of 393, considering the cyclical nature of their nesting cycles.

“I think the greens have made a pretty remarkable comeback the last few decades,” Anderson said.

Anderson noted that it can take 20-30 years for a green sea turtle to reach sexual maturity. He said it’s likely we are seeing the benefits of conservation efforts from decades ago.

There were recent factors at play in northern Palm Beach County, Perrault said. The county’s temporary closing of beaches during the coronavirus pandemic seemed to lead to a lower rate of false crawls, Perrault said. Those are instances where sea turtles come to shore but do not nest.

A similar dynamic was at play in Boca, Anderson said, but he added that it was more or less an average year for false crawls by season’s end.

Loggerhead researchers are working on a paper about the shutdown’s effect, Perrault said. Their findings could have management implications, he added.

“Maybe there’s beach closures at night for peak (nesting) season, just like June or July. … I think there’s tradeoffs here and a lot of interesting trends here we can make recommendations on for the future,” Perrault said.

Another item to watch: beach re-nourishment.

After hundreds of thousands of cubic yards of sand were used to beef up the beach between Carlin Park and Jupiter Beach Park last winter, Perrault said, a 6-foot-high embankment formed in the area that may have spurred less nesting success in the area.

He added that the new sand was pretty dense and coarse. Another re-nourishment project is planned between Juno Beach and southern Jupiter this winter.

“It’s kind of a double-edged sword,” Perrault said. “If the sand isn’t there, they don’t have habitat at all.”

Across the Martin County line at Blowing Rocks Preserve on Jupiter Island, The Nature Conservancy reported more than 700 nests this year, topping the 2019 count.

“One interesting thing to note is that it was another high nesting year at the preserve for green sea turtles, which typically have a high year followed by a low nesting year,” the conservancy’s South Florida land conservation coordinator, Sarah Martin, said in a statement. “There are many different factors that can contribute to nesting prevalence in a season, including but not limited to habitat conditions both in the water and on land.”

https://www.palmbeachpost.com/story/news/local/jupiter/2020/11/02/2020-another-good-year-nesting-turtles-palm-beach-county/6121716002/