Heavy Breathing

I would have bet that reptile mating rituals were a wham, bam, thank you ma’am scenario.  Not so for the loggerhead sea turtle.  On the way to Snipes we noticed a commotion off the port bow.  After a slow approach, imagine our surprise to discover sea turtles having their way with one another.  It was quite the spectacle. They were far too occupied to notice five humans madly photographing them or our continuous stream of hushed commentary and laughter.  They eventually broke apart but to our delight they swam back into each other’s flippers.   

Inquiring minds led us to the Key West aquarium for the daily presentation on loggerheads.  What remarkable creatures.  Their shell is 2.5 to 3.5 feet long and weigh 155 lbs – 355 lbs.  They can live up to 70 and start mating at maturity which occurs between 17 and 33.

Loggerheads are solitary beings and notable travelers, migrating hundreds and occasionally thousands of miles between their feeding grounds and nesting beach.  Amazingly, females often return to the same nesting beach where they were born.  How the loggerheads navigate is a mystery although those who study such things have theories.

When it’s time to make babies, males come a courting, plying the female with gentle love bites or a bit of nuzzling. The female says yeah or nay.  If yeah, the male uses the hooks on his front flippers to attach himself to the back of the female’s shell. He then folds his long tail under her shell to get the job done.  They can go at it for hours.

When it is time to lay the eggs, the loggerhead crawls up her sandy birth beach, digs a hole, lays approximately 100 ping pong sized eggs, fills the hole and heads back out to sea.

There is not a helicopter mom in the bunch.  Once she disguises the nest, the mom has nothing more to do with her babies.  In roughly 60 days, they hatch, help each other out of the nest and head to sea, hoping to avoid predators every step of the way.  Turns out many birds and fish think baby turtles are a tasty treat.

Loggerhead girls only nest every two to three years and have 2 – 5 egg clutches each breeding season.  With this rate of reproduction and typical predation (learned a new word), human interference in the life cycle has resulted in a decline in loggerhead population. Trash is also a problem.  When in the water, plastic bags look like jelly fish, a staple of the loggerhead diet.  Imagine eating a plastic bag.  Not good for loggerheads either.  For more information check out the Turtle Conservancy website.

A photography tip.  I am going to keep my camera in multiple image mode.  There is always time to take it off and rarely time to add it.  With all the thrashing about and flippers flapping, it was hard to capture and frame images properly with only a single shot.

So there you go.  Something interesting to start the day.