To summarize how sea turtles are affected by light pollution, you should watch the videos below – one is a super short cute animation while the other is somewhat longer but has real visual of those cute sea turtles. Enjoy!
I know it’s so sad to see the little baby turtles all lost and unable to find the ocean.. But some nice people in the world are trying to help them on their own! In south Florida, a group of volunteers under the Sea Turtle Oversight Protection (STOP) spend time to observes nests and assist disoriented newborn sea turtles to reach the ocean safely (Earth911, 2019). They have managed to assist about 25 thousand to 30 thousand hatchlings to the ocean on average per year. Honestly, I admire these individuals to go out of their way to take the time to help these creatures reach where they belong safely. Other commendable efforts include the Gulf Environmental Benefit Fund which enabled Sea Turtle conservancy and other organizations to amp up turtle conservation efforts such as dimming the lights at public beaches and a 10 year strategy for investments to improve recovery of seven sea turtle populations in the Western Hemisphere, by the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation NFWF (NFWF, n.d.). While these efforts were concentrated in Florida, it is a good start for helping sea turtles. Other countries and organizations should continue doing their part to help sea turtles by reducing artificial lighting in beaches especially.
One potential solution was proposed briefly by Tuxbury and Salmon (2005) which involves creating dunes and artificial light reduction to aid in hatchling orientations. The dunes are to serves as natural cues to guide the hatchlings in the correct direction along with reduced artificial lighting. While this seems plausible, maintaining the dunes might be difficult. Especially, since dunes change according to windspeed and direction and sometimes require plants to stabilise it. This might then be counter productive if it were to cause hatchlings to be exposed on shore for longer period of time due to changed direction or if they to get tangled in the plants that stabilise the dunes. Even though I am slight skeptical of the effectiveness of this proposed solution, I believe that the idea of incorporating natural cues and reducing artificial lighting is a good start. Perhaps, the limitations I predicted can be easily overcome with some modifications (I mean who am I to know for sure whether it will pose significant limitations) …
References
Earth911 (2019) Available at: https://earth911.com/inspire/volunteers-rescue-disoriented-sea-turtles/
Tuxbury, S.M. & Salmon, M. (2005) Competitive interactions between artificial lighting and natural cues during seafinding by hatchling marine turtles, Biological conservation, vol. 121, no. 2, pp. 311-316.
NFWF, National Fish and Wildlife Foundation (n.d.) Available at: https://www.nfwf.org/media-center/featured-stories/keeping-sea-turtles-dark
hope you enjoyed this post that brings some optimism regarding the problems sea turtles face 🙂