Hatching Turtles

   Hatchlings emerge in a mad scramble and crawl toward the ocean. Once the hatchlings reach the water, they must negotiate the surf.
   The tiny turtles instinctively know how to swim. The first taste of ocean they encounter is the shallow sheet flow of a spent wave, which lifts each turtle slightly. Instantly they stop crawling and begin flapping swim strokes.
   When the next wave hits each turtle dives to the bottom and rides the undertow out to the calm water beyond the breakers.
   The hatchlings will swim for up to 24 hours until they reach safer deep water. They are nourished by residual yolk sac in their stomach. They will hide from predators in the sea grasses offshore for the next three years as they grow.

   Once the nest has hatched, its time for the Turtle Volunteers to swing into action again. The nest is excavated. The hatched, or pipped, eggs are counted. Any unhatched eggs are also counted.
   Sometimes live hatchlings are found in the nest. These hatchlings will be released later that evening, in the dark, and allowed to crawl across the same sand they would have traversed had they made it out of the nest.
   Females always return faithfully to the same beach to nest, often emerging from the surf within a few hundred yards of the site where they last nested.
   More amazingly, females nest where they were born. It is believed that a female hatchling imprints on the unique qualities of a beach while still in the nest or during her first trip to the sea.

Cues that can help her identify her beach include smell, low-frequency sound such as surf noise, magnetic fields and the characteristics of seasonal offshore currents.
Turtle volunteers have come to expect and anticipate their returning friends, born up to thirty years ago on the beaches of South Walton. We are watching over the new generations, hoping for their return in the future.