Hawksbill Turtle Aggregation Being Documented in the Lower Florida Keys

With the support of the National Save The Sea Turtle Foundation, the Project has been able to extend its focus to the opposite end of the Florida Reef Tract, in the beautiful shallow coral reefs just off the shores of Key West. Here, team members were able to discover areas most likely to be inhabited by hawksbills, and were able to capture six individuals for evaluation and documentation. They were healthy young turtles with strikingly patterned heads and beautiful shells. As expected, these turtles were, on average, smaller than those we typically find in the deeper waters of Palm Beach County, indicating that they have more recently arrived from pelagic ‘juvenile-stage’ habitats to the nearshore ‘subadult-stage’ environment. We suspect that some may move northward along Florida’s east coast as they mature, and carry with them clues of their whereabouts as they go. To test our hypothesis, we are taking small samples of blood, skin, and shell from hawksbills all along the coastline to help track their intake of carbon, nitrogen, and sulfur as they’ve grown. Some of the variants of these elements are known to be unique to certain food sources and locations along Florida’s coast, thus leaving a timeline of their intake (and associated location) within the slow-growing tissues of the turtles.