Florida\u2019s sea turtle nesting surveying comes to a close on Halloween and like everything else in 2020, the season was a bit weird.<\/p>\n
The number of green sea turtle nests on central and southern Brevard County, Florida beaches monitored by University of Central Florida biologists were way up during a year they should have been down based on nearly 40 years of historical data.<\/p>\n
\u201cUsually, green turtles alternate between high years and low years, but this year they defied expectations,\u201d says Chris Long, a doctoral candidate and research assistant with UCF\u2019s Marine Turtle Research Group.<\/a> \u201cGreen turtles had the fifth highest year on the Archie Carr Refuge that we\u2019ve recorded since 1982. There is no evidence pointing to high nesting as a result of fewer people on the beaches or anything pandemic-related like that. It\u2019s difficult to know why nesting differed from expectation.\u201d<\/p>\n East-Central Florida\u2019s coastline (from Brevard to Indian River County) is among the most important nesting areas in the world for loggerhead sea turtles, and it also hosts about one-third of all green turtle nests in the state. The region is at the northern end of a \u201chotspot\u201d for leatherbacks, which nest on the local beaches at a smaller scale as well. All sea turtles in the U.S. are protected under the Endangered Species Act.<\/p>\n