Elizabeth Pinnix is the southern sites manager for the North Carolina Reserve and National Estuarine Research Reserve, a state and federal partnership that protects over 40,000 acres of estuary.
Before boarding a boat to travel over to Masonboro Island from UNCW’s Center for Marine Science, she described the mission for the day to a group of volunteers.
“We're going to go out today because there's a sea turtle nest that hatched earlier in the week, and so we're going to go out to excavate it. So that just means digging it up to do an inventory: how many hatched, how many didn't hatch, and sometimes there's some stragglers in the bottom that we'll be able to release,” she said.
The nests incubate for 60 to 75 days, depending on temperature. Warmer temperatures mean the turtles will hatch more quickly — and it means there will be more females in the nest, too.
“The sex determination of turtles is actually determined by the temperature of the sand. So when they're incubating underground, hotter temperatures will create more female turtles, whereas colder temperatures produce more male turtles,” she said.
At the northern end of the nesting range, North Carolina tends to produce more males than southern states like Florida. But scientists can’t tell the sex of turtles for sure unless they take a DNA sample — or wait for turtles to reach sexual maturity, which can take 30 years or more. Males are differentiated by their long tails.
The scientists and volunteers visited Nest 14 on Masonboro. As her colleague, Morgan Penrose, southern sites specialist for the NC Coastal Reserve and National Estuarine Research Reserve, was excavating the nest, Pinnix told volunteers that nests can have a mix of male and female hatchlings due to varying underground temperatures.
“Sometimes the internal part of the nest could be cooler, and the outside could be hotter. So it really just varies. There's not much known about that because it's hard to test it when they're hatching. Oh well, this is yay! I did it again,” Pinnix said, referring to the last time WHQR visited in 2022 and got to see baby turtles remaining in the nest.
And she added, when looking at the small turtles, “These are very happy hatchlings too.”
With gloves on, Pinnix held up a baby turtle flapping its little fins — already trying to swim away. She said they need to get offshore within a few days of hatching and absorbing their embryos. That’s why digging out stragglers quickly is important.
“So really, once they hatch, they absorb their embryo. So on the bottom, so there's kind of this area that's their umbilical. So that would be where the yolk is attached to them, and they absorb it, and that's what gives them the energy and the nutrients to get offshore,” she said.
Pinnix said that yolk is typically gone in three to four days, “so they really need to get offshore fast and start eating. So that's why when there's any stragglers caught in the nest, we're giving them that fighting chance where they can get offshore in a good amount of time.”
Once Penrose finished digging up the 12 stragglers — in addition to 120-some of them had already made it to shore on their own — Pinnix said, “Let's go release [these] babies.”
Pinnix said it's important to let them make it to the open sea on their own.
“You want to give them the opportunity to crawl and get strong, and then that's how they kind of orient themselves to where they are, and then maybe they'll come back to Masonboro in 35 years,” she said.
Warren Darrell was one of the volunteers who traveled to Masonboro to see the baby turtles. He noted that turtles typically like to hatch in the evenings, which helps them avoid predators.
“I think that's why they come out at night because the gulls and the crabs and everything will go after them. Swim, little turtles,” he said.
Darrell added he’s grateful to have moved to the area about nine years ago.
“It’s like living next to Yellowstone Park or something. I mean, this is why we're here,” he said.
On the beach, the scientists and volunteers saw one gull eyeing one of them. While nature sometimes takes its course with some of the baby turtles — and their nests, the NC Coastal Reserve does have to look out for other predators like coyotes.
“We do predator management on this island to protect our listed species. So we have an issue with coyotes preying on our shore, nesting shorebirds, and sea turtles, and most of those are either listed or on some type of protected list, while coyotes are not. So we had an obligation to kind of protect those species,” Pinnix said.
Nonetheless, she said what their journey will be like now that they’re in the water.
“They just swim nonstop until they get far offshore where they can find some cover, typically in some sargassum, kind of floating seaweed, and they'll kind of hide up in it and eat little crabs or little fish that are hiding in there, and they use that as their protection where they rest and then get bigger,” she said.
Pinnix said overall, it’s been a good year for sea turtle nests in the state – and for Masonboro Island, it’s about an average year.
For the state, it’s 1,924 nests since August 7. A large majority are loggerheads and a much smaller minority are greens (41), leatherbacks (7), and Kemp’s Ridley (1).
And while the turtles are approaching the end of nesting season, they can continue into October.
Pinnix will send one of the egg samples to a lab at the University of Georgia. For about a decade, scientists have been able to determine whether it’s the same females returning to the same locations year after year.
While most of the nesting female turtles have a code attached to them, a couple of them are ones the scientists are eager to see again. Pinnix said they’ve been looking for Junebug to make her return.
“So we actually intercepted her at night when she was nesting and found out she was missing a rear flipper, so she wasn't able to dig that egg chamber how she wanted to. But she had come back about six years, so we had had her DNA coming back year after year after year, and she really only nests on the north end of the island, right at the jetty,” she said.
There’s also an ‘inlet turtle’ — who, for reasons scientists don’t understand, chooses the busy Carolina Beach Inlet.
And turtle moms, Pinnix said, can even nest up to 90 years old; there are records of them nesting at 100.
The DNA lab is also trying to identify male turtles through a sample from their fin.
Resources
- If you're ever out on the beach and you see a turtle, a hatchling, or tracks, you can call the sea turtle hotline at (252) 241-7367.
- Pinnix's work number, if you want to call her directly: 910-620-0005.
