Florida, a year-round, resident loggerhead population that is 

 composed entirely of subadults occurs. Adults that come to the 

 central Florida coast to breed rarely enter the lagoon system and 

 leave the area after the nesting season. Whether this separation 

 by life history stage is maintained by foraging loggerheads 

 elsewhere in the western Atlantic is unclear. Apparently only 

 about half of the 13 countries/regions that have substantial 

 loggerhead foraging, have populations that include subadults 

 (Table 3). All 13 have adult foragers. The information in Table 

 3 can be misleading in this regard because, as in the case of the 

 U.S., both adults and subadults do forage in territorial waters 

 but, as noted above, they maintain almost total separation in 

 habitat. The data in Table 3 suggest that the same situation may 

 prevail in other parts of the western Atlantic. 



Status of Nesting Beach Management and Production 



Virtually all of the information relating to nesting beach 

 management practice and trends in hatchling production is from 

 studies in the southeastern U.S. Descriptions of the procedures 

 are found in Bjorndal and Balazs (1983) and in Hopkins and 

 Richardson (1984). Management techniques that involve moving 

 eggs to artificial hatcheries or protecting nest sites have 

 enjoyed tremendous popularity and governmental support and are 

 employed at many places in Florida, Georgia and the Carol inas. 

 These projects regularly produce hatchlings from 70 to 85% of the 

 incubated eggs (Fletemeyer 1982, 1983, 1984; Hopkins and Murphy 

 1982) and seem capable of doing so for the foreseeable future. 

 With the advent of a spate of anti-beachfront-lighting 

 ordinances, which promote the transit of emergent hatchlings to 

 the surf the best way to describe this aspect of loggerhead 

 conservation in the U.S. seems to be by the old nautical adage, 

 "Steady as she goes." 



I agree wholeheartedly, however, with Pritchard (1980), when 

 he wrote, "lest we get completely carried away by the conviction 

 that our efforts are indeed saving sea turtles, and fail to 

 maintain a constant critical appraisal of our efforts, it is 

 worth reviewing the different things that people try and do to 

 save sea turtles, to judge whether these techniques are indeed as 

 purely beneficial as we might think." In order to assess the 

 success of our beach management techniques we need to compare the 

 results to hatchling production rates in totally natural 

 situations. Such data are not as abundant as one might think, 

 especially if adequate sample size (say, 20+ nests) is 

 considered. Caldwell (1959) reported mean hatching success for 

 62 nests in South Carolina as 73.4%. Recently, Witherington 

 (1986) , in one of the most thorough studies of its kind (N=97 

 nests), observed a 55.7% natural hatch rate. The latter study 

 was conducted on a heavily nested Florida beach where raccoon 

 predation is unusually low (7-15%) , but the results included the 

 loss of almost 25% of the eggs to a late summer storm, which does 



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