Turtle Guide

Each year, volunteers from the Sea Turtle Conservation Bonaire make sure that all the newly born loggerhead sea turtles make their way to the ocean. This year, when the 112 small baby turtles hatched on the Caribbean Islands, people noticed that the turtles were hatching far away from the ocean, near the airport. Because the loggerheads use moonlight as their guide, they can get confused with all the flashing lights in the airport and the moon and end up going in the wrong direction. A couple years ago, the innocent group of turtles were killed on the road because they were misled by lights other than the moon. To make sure this won't happen again, the volunteers from the Sea Turtle Conservation Bonaire watched the eggs when they began to hatch. When the July 1st, the day the turtles would be going into water finally came, the  volunteers created a human wall around all the small turtles to block out all light besides moonlight. Because these volunteers created this wall, all the baby turtles survived and got to the ocean. Loggerhead sea turtles are one of the many endangered species; many of the baby loggerheads that only hatch every 2 or 3 years die from land animals and older adult loggerheads are preyed upon by larger animals (For example: sharks.). There are also many unintentional deaths caused by fishing trawls. Protect the turtles!