Halfway into nesting season for loggerhead sea turtles, Georgia’s No.1 marine turtle is bound for a record summer.
By June 22, roughly the midway mark, the Georgia Sea Turtle Cooperative had documented 2,366 nests. (The total has since climbed to over 2,800.)
Citing the first-half count, DNR Sea Turtle Coordinator Mark Dodd expects about 4,700 nests by season’s end. That would easily be the most since comprehensive surveys began on Georgia beaches in 1989. The previous high was 4,072 in 2022.
The prediction isn’t a sure bet, of course. This has been a weird season, Dodd said, one characterized by stronger-than-normal “pulses” of more females nesting during a night. Those surges also have come in regularly timed patterns, like waves, or what Dodd calls “a high level of temporal nesting synchrony.”
Small pulses are not uncommon, he explained. They are usually caused by factors such as stormy nights deterring turtles from the beach and creating pent-up demand to nest. What’s odd this summer is not only the higher numbers of loggerheads nesting at a time, but “the extent to which the pulses are synchronized,” roughly every 12-13 days.
“We’re having these really big pulses,” Dodd said. “And then these slow days.”
For example, Ossabaw Island set its single-day record with 31 nests June 16. Two days later, only eight loggerheads crawled onto the island’s wild beaches to lay eggs.
But, Georgia was due a big year. Thanks to conservation work such as the cooperative monitoring and protecting nests, the big, federally threatened turtles are steadily if slowly recovering. Also, nesting in the state had followed a roughly three-year cycle. Until, that is, last summer, which was the third since the record count in 2022 and thus expected to be ultra busy. Yet with just over 1,900 nests, 2025 had the fewest in four years.
The up-and-down nesting so far this year has masked how well things were going for loggerheads.
Which could also help explain why cooperative members checking the beaches at dawn every day are so tired, Dodd quipped.
“Now maybe we know.”
Wayward loggerhead in the marsh near Fort Pulaski (Special to GaDNR)
FOR MORE …
- See the rescue of a loggerhead that took a wrong turn into the marsh near Fort Pulaski on Father’s Day.
- Check daily beach-by-beach nesting updates in Georgia.