Some rarely seen sea turtle eggs being monitored at Long Beach Aquarium of the Pacific have hatched, officials announced Saturday.
“We are excited to share that some of the olive ridley sea turtle eggs from Seal Beach successfully hatched after a 58-day incubation period,” the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said in a social media post Saturday morning. “Working with our partners, we carefully released them from the beach in the dark early hours of this morning. The hatchlings were released where light, human disturbance and other distractions were minimal.
“Following emergence, sea turtle hatchlings undergo a `frenzy period,’ which is an intense, 24-48 hour period of continuous frantic swimming after they reach the ocean surf, fueled entirely by their remaining absorbed egg yolk sac.”
The eggs were removed from two Orange County beaches threatened by high surf and tides in September. That decision was hailed as a life-saving move for the turtles, which are rarely seen in Los Angeles and Orange counties.
“It is likely the nests could have been inundated with water and destroyed from the high surf and waves associated with tropical storm Rachel,” a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service representative told City News Service in October. “Both Seal Beach and Huntington Beach documented high surf and standing water in the vicinity of the nests after the storm.”
More than 200 endangered olive ridley sea turtle eggs were being monitored at the Long Beach aquarium.
Two teams set out around dawn on Sept. 25 to excavate the nests near the Seal Beach National Wildlife Refuge and in Huntington Beach, removing 104 eggs from Seal Beach and 100 from Huntington Beach, according to Aquarium of the Pacific President and CEO Jeffrey Flocken.
The eggs were transported to the aquarium and incubated in hopes that they would be viable and hatch, Flocken said.
“This is an unprecedented situation, and we’re proud to provide a temporary home for these eggs as they incubate,” Dr. Lance Adams, veterinarian at the Aquarium of the Pacific, said at the time. “We’re hopeful that this will lead to a successful hatching in the near future and a successful release back to the wild.”
Officials had been monitoring Hurricane Polo and the potential for large swells at the time. The storm, later followed by tropical storm Rachel, contributed to powerful swells that pounded Southern California shores with damaging surf, overwhelming multiple beaches and doing severe damage to homes on the Long Beach Peninsula.
Flocken said the decision to move the eggs prior to the storms was made by federal and state wildlife officials, explaining that National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, California Fish and Wildlife, and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service got together and determined that the best chances of survival “would be to excavate those eggs before these swells happened, and potentially flooded (the area), and which would have killed the eggs in these different nests, rendering them not viable to be hatched.”
The two nests, discovered Sept. 16 and Sept. 19, were the first confirmed natural sea turtle nests on the U.S. West Coast, according to the interagency team overseeing the nests.
The first nesting spot was found near the Seal Beach National Wildlife Refuge. Three days later, an olive ridley turtle laid eggs near the Huntington Beach Pier. Officials later determined the eggs had been laid by two different turtles.
According to the NOAA, olive ridley turtles are the smallest sea turtles, with adults weighing up to 100 pounds and growing between 2 and 3 feet in length.
According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, nesting turtles typically lay multiple nests over the nesting seasons to increase chances that some will hatch successfully if others are lost.
“Any hatchlings that do emerge will be released as soon as possible that night to preserve their limited energy reserves for the journey offshore,” the agency said.
According to NOAA Fisheries’ Southwest Fisheries Science Center, the best estimate is that about 1 in 1,000 sea turtle hatchlings typically survive to adulthood, although the actual rate depends on factors such as ocean conditions, predation, fishing bycatch and other variables.
Anyone who finds a stranded turtle can call the NOAA Fisheries West Coast Stranding Hotline at 562-506-4315. Sightings of sea turtles can be reported using the NOAA Fisheries West Coast Facebook account at facebook.com/NOAAFisheriesWestCoast.