Missing!
On a slightly overcast yet beautiful day last August, folks in Emerald Isle gathered around a loggerhead sea turtle nest on the beach. It was the first nest that had been laid in Emerald Isle in the 2006 nesting season, and although volunteers had been watching the nest each night from day 55 of incucation, nobody had seen hatchlings emerge. After 80 days, it was assumed that either the hatchlings emerged unobserved during a rainstorm or that the eggs had stopped incubating, and an excavation was scheduled for late afternoon. In addition to the volunteers, a crowd of visitors on the beach gathered on the chance to see a live hatchling or two that often remain at the bottom of emerged nests. The Emerald Isle Sea Turtle Project volunteers began to dig down slowly, looking for eggs, shells or hatchlings.
They continued to dig, and dig, and dig. After about an hour and excavating a wide pit, the volunteers had found nothing except a few scraps of old turtle egg shells. What could have happened? The presence of eggs had been confirmed by the volunteers the morning after the female laid her eggs. The nest site had been marked with a sturdy pole since the nest was first laid, and nobody observed any signs of tampering of the area during the incubation. There are several possibilities, including: a) somebody moved the pole as a joke (although the volunteers digging into the nest said that they found what seemed like the nest cavity, plus a few scraps of egg-shell); b) a dog, racoon or fox dug up the nest and destroyed the eggs (although there was no sign of disturbance observed in the area since the time the nest was first laid); c) somebody surreptitiously removed the eggs before day 55 of incubation and covered all signs of disturbance; d) something else? Regardless of the ultimate reason, the lack of eggs was a cause of huge disappointment on many fronts: to the people who had gathered to see something to do with sea turtles; to the volunteers who had expended dozens of hours unknowningly watching a nest that had no eggs; to everyone who donates their time and energy to protecting the sea turtles that come to nest on North Carolina beaches. Nevetheless, this experience has redoubled the resolve of the Emerald Isle volunteers who will even more carefully inspect each of their nest sites each day during the nesting season.