No more than four inches in length, this straggling loggerhead makes its way across the sand and into the Atlantic.
It’s a warm summer Saturday night at Disney’s Vero Beach Resort, and clusters of families sporting sun-burned skin and tired vacation faces stroll under a large circular chandelier in the hotel’s air-conditioned lobby. Several of them stop to pose for pictures in front of a chest-high educational display of a sea turtle laying eggs on the beach.
Instead of stopping inside the lobby for that Kodak moment, there is a good chance that guests would be able to witness the real thing just a seashell-throw away.
Florida is home to nearly 90 percent of all sea turtle nesting in the continental United States, according to the Caribbean Conservation Corporation (C.C.C.). And a major portion of that 90 percent takes place on Florida’s east coast from the Sebastian Inlet to the St. Lucie Inlet. Biologists believe this area is responsible for more than one-fourth of all sea turtle nests, including threatened loggerhead turtles and endangered leatherback and green turtles.
Read the entire article in the Summer 2005 issue
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