Record number of sea turtles nested on our beaches this season
STORY BY JON PINE (Week of October 9, 2025)
Sea turtles, which since the last ice age have been emerging from the waves and lumbering up on the barrier island’s beaches to lay their eggs, demonstrated this summer they haven’t forgotten the way.
More than 11,000 of them visited 32963 between March 1 and Sept. 31, digging 2-foot-deep nests with their hind legs and depositing large caches of eggs in as little as an hour before disappearing back into the sea.
A record-breaking 4,620 green turtles have left their offspring on Indian River County’s beaches so far this nesting season, surpassing the previous record of 4,105 nests set in 2023, according to the county’s coastal division.
Loggerheads, the most common sea turtle to visit our shores, have dug more than 6,700 nests so far this year, and coastal division workers have identified 78 nests left by mammoth leatherbacks, the world’s largest sea turtles, which can weigh as much as 2,000 pounds.
These totals are likely to increase before end of the nesting season Oct. 31. The nesting activity peaked in July with 4,310 nests recorded that month, a 50-percent increase over July 2024.
Despite these impressive numbers, “there’s still a long way to go,” said Quintin Bergman, the county’s Coastal Resource Manager. “We’re nowhere near the population stability needed to delist them. But ideally, we want to see increases over the years. And that’s what we are seeing.”
Delisting means removing a species from the list of endangered species under the federal Endangered Species Act. All six sea turtle species found in U.S. waters, including the three that nest here, are considered endangered.
Long a favorite dish of mariners, sea turtles continue to be killed for food around the world despite their protected status. Other threats include loss of nesting and foraging habitats due to development, pollution and climate change, vessel strikes, entanglement in marine debris, and getting caught in commercial fishing nets.
While it is impossible to precisely number these widely scattered and nomadic animals, consensus estimates peg the current worldwide sea turtle population at about 6 million, down from hundreds of millions prior to the industrial revolution.
The county has spent approximately $650,000 on monitoring efforts this year, said Kylie Yanchula, the county’s natural resources director. This includes monitoring required by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, as well as keeping an eye on construction projects, she said.
“I think that the county’s program for monitoring sea turtle nests these last 20 years has been a great benefit,” Bergman said.
Although sea turtles spend almost their entire lives in the ocean, adult females return to the beaches where they were born to lay their eggs, due to a mysterious phenomenon called natal homing.
If you come across a sick, injured, or dead sea turtle, call the FWC Wildlife Hotline at 1-888-404-3922. Nesting data is updated weekly at the county’s Coastal Division webpage:
