Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
website and track your adopted turtle's nesting activity. For your $25 adoption fee,
you'll receive a list of adoptees and an adoption form, a semiannual newsletter, and
a Caretta Research Project bumper sticker.
LOGGERHEAD STATS
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While hatchlings are a mere 2 inches in length, adults can be up to 3 feet
long and weigh as much as 350 pounds.
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Only 1 in 1,000 hatchlings survives to adulthood.
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Females, which lay as many as ten clutches at a time, lay eggs only every
two or three years.
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The average loggerhead lives 50 to 75 years.
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The loggerhead's name comes from the turtle's unusually large head.
•
Even though loggerheads don't reach maturity for 20 or 25 years, they
somehow remember where they were born and return to the same place two
decades later to lay their eggs.
•
Loggerhead turtles migrate more than 8,000 miles—alone, without other
turtles guiding the way. The journey, which takes them across the Atlantic
past the Azores, takes five to ten years to complete.
•
Although their streamlined bodies and flippers are perfect for the ocean,
they are nearsighted and defenseless on land.
•
When loggerhead hatchlings break out of their shells at night, they instinct-
ively crawl toward the brightest light on the horizon. On an undeveloped
beach, that's the moon's reflection off the surf. However, on a developed
beach, the brightest light can be a light from a nearby disco.
•
An estimated 14,000 females nest in the southeastern United States each
year.
Working in cooperation with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Savannah Science
Museum, and the Wassaw Island Trust, the Caretta Research Project has been around since
1972. It's one of the longest running marine turtle tracking projects in the United States. And
while scientists are slow to take credit, there is striking evidence suggesting the project has
been successful. The number of loggerhead clutches on Wassaw has gone from 50 or 60 in
the mid-1980s to more than 100 in recent years.
