marinelife

[marinelife]

Artificial lighting is one of the main reasons for sea turtle extinction. To understand this fully we need to understand their life cycle.

Adult sea turtles come to shore to lay their eggs. Then they go back to the ocean and continue the life cycle. After 50-60 days however many eggs have successfully developed, they will break out of their eggs and begin to go to the sea. Often times a lot of the sea turtles don’t make it because of predators and disorientation. Then, they go out and find a coral reef for which they stay at got 10 years growing and eating the coral, until they mate and then restart the process.

It seems like they have it easy but really they don’t. When the sea turtles are coming to shore to lay their eggs they biggest predator they face is tourists. Often times tourists are walking the beaches and stumble across them and disrupt their nature to come, lay eggs, and leave. They get stressed out and decide not lay their eggs. If the beaches aren’t adequate for egg laying and they have multiple false crawls they will resort to less than optimal spots or they can even resort to laying their eggs in the sea. Which obviously they will not hatch after that.

Sea turtle nests often times get dug up, the eggs get tossed around, squished, or taken home and not properly incubated and they end up not hatching.

After the baby sea turtles hatch they make their way towards the sea where they face many issues. They often times are swooped up by birds or meet people which they then get messed with and end up crawling away from the sea to get away from the people, which then disorients them and they end up climbing into city streets, peoples pools, and more.

Sea turtles used to have no problem laying eggs, but now they have to compete with tourists, business, and costal residents for their beaches. Artificial lighting is one of the main issues with sea turtles and that will be the one I focus on today.

Artificial lighting causes baby sea turtles to get disoriented and wander inland, where they often die from dehydration or predation. Baby sea turtle’s natural instincts are to follow the brightest horizon, which is usually over the ocean. Now because on the beaches we have costal residents, business, tourists, and much more the city’s have become the brightest horizon, which leads the sea turtles inland. Most often than not, this causes sea turtles to be ran over, die from dehydration, or drown in swimming pools.

While this might seem a difficult problem to tackle an estimated 1/3 of all U.S. lighting is wasted annually. We can help by making sure all lights that are visible from beaches are off when they’re not being used, you can use low pressure sodium-vapor lighting (LPS) instead of normal lights, if you find disoriented hatchling away from the ocean call law enforcement so they can safely re-place them, you can tint your windows at the beach to dim your house lighting from the outside, and you can use blackout curtains for when your windows are closed.

This may seem like a lot of work, really it’s not though. And if you think about it this is helping the ecosystem, and the sea turtles.

#marine life #ocean #sea turtles #marine biology #nature