Nesting Time Again

It is that time again for the big event at Kennedy Space Center! No, not a launch - it is time for the annual nesting of the Loggerhead turtles! Wildlife is abundant at Kennedy Space Center and lives in harmony with the space program activities year-round. The Loggerhead Turtle, a threatened species, is found in temperate and subtropical oceans throughout the world. The Loggerhead is a highly mobile species with no clear home ranges defined to date. The second largest nesting colony in the world is along Florida's East Coast. Nesting is common to North Carolina, but the majority of the nesting occurs in Florida.

KSC provides two habitat types for two different life stages of this species, the reproductively mature females and the sub-adults and juveniles. Nesting occurs on the KSC beaches each summer between April and September. About 98 % of all marine turtle nests on KSC are Loggerheads. Seasonal nest estimates for the secured stretch of KSC beach (10 km) ranged from 888 nests in 1984 to 1,791 nests in 1990. The total reproductive potential, disregarding actual hatch success, during the last eight years is about 1 million hatchlings. The loggerhead turtle leaves the water during the night and crawls ashore to lay her eggs in a sandy nest. The task of excavating a nest may take her over an hour to accomplish. The turtle, weighing several hundred pounds, digs a nest cavity with her rear flippers. She then deposits approximately 100 pliable ping-pong ball sized eggs into the chamber, covers them with sand, and returns to the sea. After roughly a two-month incubation period, a cluster of tiny hatchlings emerges from the sand and scrambles to the Gulf.

The existence of this species has been severely threatened because of fishing operations. In addition, a continuing threat to the clutches (eggs) deposited at KSC is predation by Raccoons and, to a lesser degree, Feral Pigs. The levels of predation vary with the area and predator control methods. On KSC, enough Raccoons have been removed from the beach to drop predation rates dramatically to the 1-2% level.

Another problem faced by the species in this locale is disorientation of hatchlings. Disorientation is believed to be the confusion of newly emerged turtles whereby they avoid a dark background and head for the brighter horizon. On undisturbed beaches this brighter horizon would be the ocean and the darker areas would be the dune or land mass. In lighted areas the opposite is true and can cause this disorientation.