How many sea turtles were born on Hilton Head this year? A look at the numbers
The nesting season for everyone’s favorite sea creatures on Hilton Head Island has come to an end.
The last baby sea turtles of 2021 have crawled into the ocean, the Sea Turtle Patrol announced on Thursday.
How did the hatchlings and mothers fare this year?
Amber Kuehn, director of the Sea Turtle Patrol, has the numbers.
There were 283 sea turtle nests on the island in 2021, including one green turtle nest, according to Kuehn and state data. The rest were loggerhead nests.
That’s down slightly from the 291 nests in 2020, Kuehn said. She expects there to be more nests in 2022.
The “emergent success” rate of hatchlings, meanwhile, was above average this year, she said. There were 22,107 hatchlings that got out into the world and 23,017 eggs that hatched, state data show.
There also were 180 false crawls, which is when a mother sea turtle returns to the water without laying eggs. There were 152 false crawls in 2020.
False crawls, Kuehn said, typically occur when people happen upon turtles on the beach or when turtles run into obstacles such as a sandcastle or a hole.
She added that there were 28 nests this year where hatchlings were disoriented by nearby lights. There were 38 such cases in 2020, she said.
That means there’s been an improvement since the town’s new beach lighting rules went into effect earlier this year. But there’s still much work to be done in terms of educating visitors about sea turtles, Kuehn said.
Tourists’ beach etiquette, she said, is a big problem.
“It kind of gives me the idea that most people are not coming for ecotourism,” Kuehn said.
Kuehn said she hopes to bolster the Sea Turtle Patrol’s educational outreach in the coming months. She wants to focus on the children of service industry workers, so the kids tell their parents about how to protect sea turtles, and then the parents tell tourists at restaurants and hotels.
“Our goal is to reach as many short-term rental owners as we can,” Kuehn said.
