"Long before the condos and the streetlights, Florida's beaches would be covered in sea turtles every summer night. Hundreds of thousands of them, coming up out of the surf to dig their nests in the sand. The first explorers wrote about the 'infinite number of turtles' on Florida's coast. Today, every one of our five sea turtle species is threatened or endangered. What happened?"
When the Beaches Were Dark With Turtles
Before European settlement, Florida's beaches hosted enormous numbers of nesting sea turtles. Early Spanish and British explorers wrote of beaches 'dark with turtles' and of 'infinite numbers' of them. All five of Florida's sea turtle species — loggerhead, green, leatherback, Kemp's ridley, and hawksbill — historically nested along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts. Loggerheads, the most abundant, probably numbered in the hundreds of thousands of nesting females. Sea turtles are ancient: they've been nesting on these same beaches for over 100 million years, since the age of the dinosaurs. They return to the beach where they were born to nest — a remarkable navigational feat. For millions of years, the only threats to sea turtles were natural predators (raccoons, ghost crabs, birds) and occasional disease. The arrival of humans — and particularly modern development — would change that within a single century.
