More than a half million loggerhead sea turtle hatchlings made their way into the ocean from our beautiful South Carolina beaches this year. That’s one heck of a record season all along the Palmetto State’s coast.
With a preliminary figure of 524,518 emerged eggs, sea turtles have laid the most nests on South Carolina beaches in 2019 since record keeping began in the early 1980s, according to the S.C. Department of Natural Resources.
It dwarfs any recent year on record. For comparison, 2016 was the previous record nesting year, and it had 396,441 eggs emerge.
A whopping 8,798 loggerhead sea turtle nests were laid in this season on state beaches; destroying the previous record of 6,444 set in 2016, which had surpassed the then-previous record of 5,193 set in 2013.
According to a report in the Post & Courier, more females are coming in to nest in recent years and are believed to be breeding-age adults born in the 1980s when more stringent nest protection was getting underway.
During that decade, about a half-million hatchlings crawled to the sea from S.C. nests. In the years since, the success rate has seen more than 10 times that number make the crawl. In the past 10 years alone more than 2.5 million hatchlings emerged, according to DNR estimates.
Then came 2019, matching the hatchling total of the entire first decade.
When they were put on the federal endangered species list, the numbers of Atlantic nesting loggerheads were thought to be in decline.
South Carolina, however, has been a leader in the recovery work, according to the article. The sheer numbers of female turtles that might be out there suggest a wilder prospect: Thousands more nests could soon jam the beaches.
Local surprises this turtle season
