Some beach-goers may be familiar with sea turtles enjoying the beach while wowed tourists gaze upon their typically brown shells and large bodies.
When a relatively small turtle with a gray shell came to lay her 95 eggs in North Myrtle Beach on Wednesday, May 4, however, North Myrtle Beach Sea Turtle Patrol determined that it was a rather unlikely sighting, as the turtle was not your average loggerhead, leather back or green sea turtle; it was an extremely endangered female Kemp’s ridley.
“Kemp’s really are the smallest species of sea turtle found in the world and they’re also the most endangered species,” Evan Cooper of the Sea Turtle Conservancy in Gainesville, Florida, said. “So what’s really interesting about that kind of turtle is that they really only nest in one beach in Mexico called Rancho Nuevo.”
When North Myrtle Beach Beach Patrol arrived on scene, they had to stop multiple onlookers from disturbing the nesting turtle, Linda Mataya, leader of the North Myrtle Beach Sea Turtle Patrol, said.
“She came ashore between five and 5:30 p.m. and just crawled up the beach above the high tide line,” Mataya said. “Kemp’s are very rare in our area. We get a lot of the juveniles but we hardly ever have any nesting females here, but they are known to come in the daylight. ... By the time we got down there, she was starting to dig her hole for her eggs. So we just watched her for about an hour and she laid her eggs and when she was done, she covered the hole back up and went back into the water.”
Mataya said there was another Kemp’s nest in the Cherry Grove area in 2020 and that the turtle who laid those eggs may be the same turtle seen in North Myrtle Beach, but she said there is no way to verify that without a DNA study.
It is unknown how far the mother turtle traveled to lay her eggs in North Myrtle Beach or why her kind may be starting to frequent east coast waters.
“There has been less than ten recorded Kemp’s nests in South Carolina in the last 30 years, so that is how rare it is,” Mataya said.
The eggs are being watched over by the North Myrtle Beach Sea Turtle Patrol. Mataya said they are protecting the eggs not only from people touching them, but also from predators such as foxes and coyotes.
“If you see a sea turtle coming ashore, it’s very important to stay back and leave her alone. Everybody wants to take a picture and shine lights on her if it’s after dark, but they are very skittish, and that will cause them to turn around and go back into the water and if they can’t nest within a certain period of time, they normally drop all their eggs in the water. So they’re all destroyed,” Mataya said.
It is possible that the eggs are hybrids. Mataya said that it is possible for Kemp’s ridleys to mate with other kinds of turtles. It is unknown at this time whether the eggs are hybrids or not.
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