Remember I mentioned about how sea turtle were affected by light pollution? Well let’s learn more about it (plus it gives me an excuse to post cute pictures of sea turtles).
First up, let’s take a look at loggerhead turtles.
Nesting behaviour of loggerhead turtles was investigated on the beach of the island Boa Vista. They even experimented using three colours of artificial lighting to see if there was any differences or similarities in the effects of different coloured lighting. The nesting attempts and success of the attempts in artificial lighting compared to the original dark control was significantly lesser (Silva et al., 2017).
As seen above, you could say that the number of nesting attempts and success at nesting was comparable across all coloured lighting with minor differences. Also, the artificial lighting often led to turtles being disoriented where they crawled in circles near light sources (Silva et al., 2017). This meant that they take longer time to crawl to back to the sea after or before nesting since they are unable to travel in the correct direction. Overall, artificial lighting negative impacts nesting behaviour of the loggerhead turtles as they naturally tend to nest during the night which is supposed to be dark. However, it should be noted that nesting behaviour is also influenced by other factors like temperature and sand moisture which contribute to favourable conditions for the sea turtles to nest. Thus, while artificial lightin is an important factor that influences the nesting behaviour, we cannot assume that it is the only factor and that there is a causation. What we can conclude is that there is a negative correlation between artificial lighting and nesting behaviour.
While we don’t know whether the extent of the impact on other species of sea turtles would be exactly the same, it is highly probable that the negative correlation is to be observed among other species as long they depend on the moonlight for nesting as well. To highlight the severity of the issue, Brei et al. (2016) who also investigating light pollution and sea turtles in the Carribean states that the effects of light pollution accelerates the extinction of sea turtles by affecting the nesting behaviour of turtles as well as the hatchlings behaviour.
References
Brei, M., Pérez-Barahona, A. & Strobl, E. (2016) Environmental pollution and biodiversity: Light pollution and sea turtles in the Caribbean, Journal of environmental economics and management, vol. 77, no. 77, pp. 95-116.
Silva, E., Marco, A., da Graça, J., Pérez, H., Abella, E., Patino-Martinez, J., Martins, S. & Almeida, C. (2017) Light pollution affects nesting behavior of loggerhead turtles and predation risk of nests and hatchlings, Journal of photochemistry and photobiology. B, Biology, vol. 173, pp. 240-249.
National Geographic Kids (n.d.) Available at: https://www.natgeokids.com/au/discover/animals/sea-life/loggerhead-turtle-facts/ [image]
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