Voice of the Sea Turtle

The dunes on Singer Island have been a source of contention between the condo owners, the nesting sea turtles, the city and county government, and Andrea, the first named storm of the season. Andrea battered the coastline from Florida to North Carolina, stripping away what was left of the protective dunes along Singer Island. But Andrea wasnt the first. In this sequence you can see blurry photos taken of Frances and Wilma and then the storm waves from last year. See the photo album for a slide show of all of the pictures.

Andrea Damage

Andrea arrived in mid-May, well after the start of the turtle nesting season (March 1 through October 31), and many nests were destroyed along Singer Island.

This created a real crisis for both turtles and people. Here the condo parking lot has started to collapse onto the beach. One more storm and the sea is eating away at the foundations of the building.

Once the ocean gets behind the sea wall, the sea wall collapses. Pessimists believe that eventually all of Singer Island will be walled. This would be truly unfortunate for both the people and the turtles. Once you have a seawall, the beach is gone forever. And what is the value of an oceanfront condo without a beach? Not as much as an oceanfront condo with a beach. So saving the beach serves the interests of both condo owners and turtles.

John's Place

Even the little guys get hurt. John has lost his deck, his trees, and all of his dunes. Last year Debbie is standing in front of his place looking at storm damage. This year everything is gone.

Construction Follies

Last year I blogged about new construction so close to the water line. This year you can see the results. One can only wonder what went through the builder's mind, to put such a big high-rise at water's edge. Contrast this with the WWII bunkers that are finally disintegrating after 60 years.

Sacrificial Sand

The politicians, news media and condo residents gather to press for sacrificial sand, to the tune of 1,600 tons per day. Normally this wouldn't have happened during turtle season, but the damage was too extensive to head into hurricane season without doing anything.

Relocating Turtles

Because the turtle nesting season had already started, all of the existing nests needed to be relocated. Unfortunately, if a nest is older than 24 hours and the eggs are relocated, none of them will hatch. You need to relocate them right away. Last year we had good hatching numbers for nests relocated in the 24-hour timeframe. Either way, any older nests that survived Andrea would have been doomed, with tons of sand dumped on top of them.

Each morning before the bulldozers started work the nests from the night before were excavated and moved to another location. Unfortunately, the concentration of turtle nests proved an irresistible temptation for poachers. One miscreant was apprehended in a bar trying to sell turtle eggs. I wish someone would tell these guys about Viagra.

The new dunes look very solid. We all hope not to have another bad storm or hurricane any time soon. The long-term interests of people and turtles are the same. The various government agencies, city and county governments, and citizens need to work together to find environmentally sound solutions for preserving the beach for turtles and people.

Support the Volunteers

The volunteers have been making heroic efforts to monitor the beach and save the turtle nests. Surveys have been very difficult this year, what with all of the nest relocations and additional red tape. Nesting numbers are updated regularly on http://www.singerislandseaturtles.com. Visitors are welcome!

The bounary line between the dune restoration and John D. MacArthur State Park.

Spring is here in South Florida, the nesting season has started (we already have several leatherback nests) and the loggerheads will be nesting shortly, as you can see.

Thanks to Michael Patrick O'Neill for sharing this photo of mating logggerheads taken off the Breakers in Palm Beach.

You can find his wonderful children's books (and more photos) at http://www.mpostock.com/booksa.html.

And thanks to Todd Essick for sharing these photos of Mike at work!

Todd's fine art photography can be found at http://www.essickphoto.com/.

While I was in Antibes at the Underwater Festival this last week I happened across an article in the International Herald Tribune entitled In troubled Lebanon, a safety zone for sea turtles. It tells the story of Mona Khalil and Habiba Syed and their admirable and heroic efforts to save the few remaining nesting sea turtles in a war-torn beach near Tyre, Lebanon. It's only one of three nesting beaches left in Lebanon, and they have greens and loggerheads but no leatherbacks. The women monitor the beach and put down wire mesh to protect the nests from being dug up by foxes. During the recent fighting their house was hit by an Israeli rocket. However, they had evacuated and none of the nests were damaged. You can read the story from the Tribune here: http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/10/23/features/turtles.php.

I did a little poking around and found that this wasn't the only article on Mona Khalil and Habiba Syed protecting their sea turtles. There's another article published by the World Conservation Union (http://www.iucn.org) which provides additional details. Here's a quote from the article:

Go to http://www.iucn.org/places/wescana/news/turtle.html. I cadged the nice photo of Mona and a nesting green from this article.

MSNBC also picked up the story from Reuters, which you can read at http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15195692/.

These incredible women devote themselves to rescuing sea turtles in a war zone. What could possibly be more heroic than that?

The end of this year's nesting season is nigh, and there's not a lot more action, especially at the North end where there was significant beach erosion. I'm heading out for the Underwater Festival in Antibes, France, so this will be my last blog entry for a while. A couple of weeks ago I went out surveying with Callie and Debbie, who are shown here excavating a couple of nests. 

There were no hatchlings, just eggs to count. The green turtle nests are quite deep, and require a lot of digging before you can locate the clutch and count the eggs.

One nest was very unusual because the turtle had nested under a crossover. Instead of sand, which normally covers the beach there was topsoil instead which had washed down from the condo landscaping. You can see the photo where the earth is all dark.

Nesting numbers were down, even though we ended up not having any hurricanes. The exact numbers are on the Sea Turtle Conservation League of Singer Island web site at http://www.singerislandseaturtles.com. The entire north end of the island has lost its beach, and therefore its nests. Many of the condos on the North end are considering sea walls, such as the one under construction here at Sea Dunes. Once the beach is armored, that's it for the turtles. They won't be able to nest without protective dunes. Beach armoring is a complex issue with no easy answers. The ABA Law Journal addressed the legal aspects in its July article, Up Against the Seawall. It's available online at http://www.abanet.org/journal/redesign/07fbeach.html.

The fact that the North end will likely be armored within a few years makes it all the more tragic that the Riviera Beach City Council is trying to push through a deal where they'll give away part of the public beach on the South end to a developer for a high-rise hotel. This is the widest and deepest part of the beach, and is not threatened by erosion. Local activists are circulating a petition that registered voters can sign to allow people to vote on the proposal. Mayor Brown and some of the council members are on record as saying that opponents of the deal are opposed to all development, which simply isn't true. What the opponents of the giveaway want is a renovation of the existing Ocean Mall into a world-class beach resort with protected dunes where the sea turtles can nest and the hatchlings won't get disoriented due to the lights from the tall buildings. It seems so obvious that promoting Singer Island as an eco-resort where visitors could interact with turtles and hatchlings without damaging them or the environment could be a huge tourist attraction, far outweighing the short-term financial gain from a single Marriott hotel, but greed allied with a stunning lack of imagination seems to be the main characteristics of the current government. The activist group Citizens for Responsible Growth for Riviera Beach tells the preservationist side of the story at http://www.rg4rb.org/1_new_first_Frame.htm. Try to ignore the garish colors and annoying flashing animations. Underneath it all there's some interesting content. The Palm Beach Post also has an ongoing series on the larger eminent domain controversies Riviera Beach is embroiled in on their web site at http://www.palmbeachpost.com/localnews/content/news/special_reports/riviera_beach.

Now that nesting season is over I plan to write about scuba diving pioneer Norine Rouse, who passed away this year. She is shown in this photo (taken some years ago by Douglas Seifert) with her friend Robert, who came back to visit her every year for 17 years until one year he came no more.

Her daughters have loaned her dive logs to Larry Wood, the curator of the Loggerhead Marine Life Center (http://www.marinelife.org) so that they can be transcribed and entered into a database. They constitute a unique historical record of the Palm Beach underwater environment since the 1970's. So much has been lost already that it's heartbreaking to see decisions made today that continue to negatively impact marine life in this most special corner of the world. To learn more about Norine's amazing life and the impact she had on the lives of all of the people and creatures who knew and loved her, take a look at the 6 pages of guest book entries from the Palm Beach Post at http://www.legacy.com/palmbeachpost/GB/GuestbookView.aspx?PersonId=16138604. This will give you an idea of what a great gift her detailed dive logs are for gaining a deeper understanding of how our local marine ecosystem has been degraded over time.

That's it for the sea turtle season in 2006. You'll see the volunteers from the Sea Turtle Conservation League of Singer Island out there again in 2007, hoping for a better year.