- May 1, 2024
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Deena Delany loves sea turtles.
It's evident in the way she enthusiastically speaks about the different tracks each species makes on the beach, and in her accessories. She wears dangly silver earrings with sea turtles and in this era of COVID-19, even her mask is sea turtle themed.
Delany is one of about 14 Ormond Beach residents who volunteer with the Flagler-Volusia Sea Turtle Patrol. During the May 1-Oct. 31 nesting season, the Volusia section of the Sea Turtle Patrol check for new nests every day, rain or shine just after 6 a.m., and keep an eye on existing nests as well.
Usually, the volunteers, who lend their time once or twice a week, are done around noon, but with the high number of nests on Volusia and Flagler beaches these last couple of years, that's not always the case. Delany once documented 13 new nests in one day, the highest she's ever had.
“There’s days when we don’t get home until three o’clock in the afternoon," Delany said.
Soon, the Sea Turtle Patrol's efforts will be bolstered with another method of surveillance: Eyes on the sky.
Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University has teamed up with aerospace company Northrop Grumman and the Brevard Zoo to launch a drone project that will help identify individual sea turtles, including their species, gender and unique markings, according to a press release by the university.
The "Turtle Tech" project will not only provide more insight into sea turtle conservation, but it will provide paying jobs for students.
“Students will have hands-on opportunities to work on flight operations, aircraft modifications, payload integration and much more," said John Robbins, Embry-Riddle associate professor of Aeronautical Science in the press release. "This project is a win-win for sea turtles and students.”
In both Flagler County and Volusia County, 2019 was a record-breaking year for sea turtle nests: There were 920 nests between southern Flagler Beach and Washington Oaks Gardens in Flagler County (up from 334 in 2018), while Volusia County had 984 (up from 317).
This year as of July 31, there have been 592 nests in Flagler County/Flagler Beach, and 857 total nests Volusia, including about 700 still incubating on the beach. Peak hatching time is also underway, with 5-15 hatchings a night.
Of the 592 nests in Flagler County, 492 are loggerhead nests; the rest have been green sea turtles and a handful of leatherbacks
"Generally it’s been a good year — not quite as good as it was last year," said Flagler Turtle Patrol volunteer Bob Jaeger, who monitors the section stretching from Camptown in Beverly Beach to Washington Oaks Gardens State Park.
Jaeger expects that that stretch of northern Flagler County beach, which currently has 409 nests, will have 500 by the end of the season.
"The mamas are still laying nests, up until generally mid-September," he said.
Hurricane Isaias, which passed Flagler County as a tropical storm, washed over 223 nests in his section, causing 33 to need to be rebuilt, and destroying one.
"In a sense, we got lucky," Jaeger said, noting that Hurricane Dorian had caused the loss of about 150 nests in his section las year.
It's not clear how the eggs in the washed-over nests will fare, Jaeger said: It depends on how deeply they were buried and how long they were submerged in water, and at which developmental stage.
Prolonged submersion that occurs closer to hatching time would be more likely to destroy the eggs. One advantage of Flagler County beaches is that the course coquina sand drains well, making a long, damaging soaking less likely.
In Volusia County, somewhere between 5-20% of the nests on the beach have likely been lost due to Hurricane Isaias, said said Ryan Chabot, habitat conservation plan manager for Volusia County's environmental management division. Survey crews are still re-establishing nest barriers and conducting inspections.
The 10-year average nest count in Volusia is 500 nests a year, Chabot said.
“I don’t that we’ll pass last year, but the biggest thing to do is never count out sea turtles to do the unexpected," he said. "You never know what’s going to happen.”
As in Flagler County, loggerheads are the most common species to nest on Volusia beaches, followed by green sea turtles and then leatherbacks.
Kemp's Ridley sea turtle nests are rare in both counties. There have been none this year in Flagler, and only one this year in Volusia County. Since 1996, only 14 have been documented in Volusia County, according to the Embry-Riddle press release; 10 of the 14 were laid by the same three turtles.
The Turtle Tech project will use two types of drones, the Applied Aeronautics Albatross with vertical take-off and landing capability and the DJI Matrice 210, which can capture finer-grain images of the sea turtles.
“The Albatross will do the initial wide-area detection, and then, when we find turtles of interest, that’s when we would use the DJI platform to hover and look at identifying markers like scute patterns on a turtle’s carapace,” said Roddey Smith, a chief engineer and research fellow at Northrop Grumman, in the press release.
This will allow Embry-Riddle researchers and their team to create a sea turtle database without having to apply a tracking device to each turtle. The drones will fly at 200-300 feet above ground, preventing them from disturbing the turtles.
“We see this project as solving real-world problems,” said Keith Winsten of the Brevard Zoo in the press release. “It’s great to build a bridge and put an egg on it, but what are these sea turtles doing in the surf and how does that affect their conservation? That’s the real-world question we need to answer.”
The first test flights should occur in about a month, after students arrive at Embry-Riddle for the 2020 fall semester on Aug. 24.
Delany has been volunteering with the Volusia Turtle Patrol for the last seven years. Her favorite part of the work occurs three days after a nest hatches. That's when they dig up the nests to document how many eggs hatched.
Sometimes, they find live hatchlings and get to release them into the ocean.
What happens when a nest never hatches? Delany said that after 70 days, they will dig them up to see why. Earlier this year, they dug up a nest up in the dunes that had been covered with railroad vine. To the volunteers' surprise, they found 84 live hatchlings.
“I put them in a bucket and they were jumping out of the bucket,” Delany recalled laughing. “But that was just such a thrill, and I released all of them and they all went out to the sea like they should have. That was exciting.”
It's moments like this that make it worthwhile, Delany said. Anything that will help with the conservation of sea turtles, like Embry-Riddle's Turtle Tech project, helps the volunteers, she said.
“It’s a labor of love," Delany said. "It’s a lot of hard work.”
— Jonathan Simmons contributed to this story.
