Author: Allison Ragle
July 2022
Last summer, our FAU leatherback team needed permitted students to drive up I-95 to Jupiter at midnight and check our study nest cages for hatchlings. When I saw lightning strike above, my mind wandered back to the ominous warning Dr. Wyneken had given in our first Zoom call meeting, "When you see lightning, do NOT be the tallest thing on the beach!"
I dreaded the two-mile walk to the cage in the rain. I knew if the turtles were to emerge after the last cage check and the cage wasn't open, they wouldn't make it to the water, so I had to get there. As I walked onto the beach, a crack of thunder and lightning webbed across the sky, shaking me to my core. After fighting the sand for what felt like hours, a lightning strike hit the water in the distance lighting up everything. Just then, I saw the cage! There were no hatchlings when I arrived at almost 1 AM. Disappointed, I flipped my bucket over, sat down, and let myself be mesmerized by the surf. Then a shadow emerging from the waves broke the hypnosis.
A lump caught in my throat. Dark round head, ridges along the back, and smooth skin. This was a leatherback. At this point I didn't know if I was soaking wet from rain or sweat, but it didn't matter because I was fully content in that moment. Sitting on a beach alone while a storm takes over the landscape and an endangered turtle leaves the next generation of her species in the sand; that’s a moment you don’t flee. I watched frozen as she made her way up to the beach and picked a spot.
When I felt it was safe to slip away without disturbing her, I began walking away and kept my eyes open for more turtles. Not long after, a black mass moved across the sand ahead of me. I crept closer, seeing that it wasn't just one thing, but a lot of tiny ones! I'd walked up on a hatchling emergence from an unmarked nest,–– completely natural. The nest was in the dunes and these baby green sea turtles had black scutes with white undersides.
It was 2 AM before I neared my car again. Before I left the beach, I turned to the waves, took a deep breath in, whispered thank you, and turned to go. I stopped to rinse my feet, slipped into my car, and drove home knowing I'd seen resilience of sea turtles firsthand, and how their stories aren’t so different from ours; a mother who traveled countless miles to deliver her babies safely into their nest, and hatchlings who began their way to the long and dangerous adventure - that is the story of a sea turtle.
