Loggerhead Nesting

Loggerhead Sea Turtle Nesting
Loggerhead turtles are becoming endangered more and more often. Not many people understand the dangers that these turtles are in, especially when the females are nesting. Nesting takes an important role in the lives of these turtles and is an amazing process that occurs during the season. Unfortunately, many factors disturb the process of these hatching eggs. This paper explains these factors in depth to educate the audience about the dangers involved in loggerhead nesting. Light pollution, natural disasters, and predators are described and explained as to why they affect the process of nesting. Many organizations are trying to share their knowledge on these loggerhead-nesting dangers with people and are trying to help keep the loggerheads alive.
Loggerhead sea turtles, scientifically labeled Carretta carretta, are the most global nesting turtle species and the most abundant in United State’s waters. While they are not nesting, they travel through open ocean water, spending time searching for food and resting on the sea floor. These turtles were nicknamed Loggerheads because of their large heads and strong jaw needed to break the shells of crustaceans. Loggerheads have the largest nesting range of any sea turtle, inhabiting the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific oceans (Spotila, 2004).
Female loggerheads generally reproduce between the ages of 17 and 33 after which they can travel thousands of miles to reach what is called their natal beach, the beach where they hatched, to lay their own eggs. The mother will create a nest every 12-17 days using her back legs to dig a deep hole in the sand. These holes tend to be about 3 feet deep. Then she will proceed to lay on average between 100 and 130 eggs, after w...

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...rients and balance sea floor sediments. Many environmental and government run programs have been created to help the efforts of saving sea turtles. Some of the actions include making mass fishing companies use safer methods to prevent catching turtles, ordinances that control lighting along beachside properties, and small groups protecting nests from their creation to hatching. In addition to these measures, wire mesh gratings are put over the nests in order to protect them from being scavenged by foxes (Kurz, Straley, Degregorio, 2011). Although these efforts do make a positive impact, loggerhead’s migration patterns are so vast and worldwide that it is almost impossible to truly enforce conservation efforts. This is because sometimes they can be seen as an “inconvenience”. It is important that we strive to protect this important component of the ocean’s ecosystem.