A sea turtle has laid eggs on a California beach for the first time on record, and scientists are now incubating the eggs in an aquarium in the hope they hatch.
A beachgoer spotted the first turtle nesting near Seal Beach at around 3 p.m. on Sept. 16 and alerted lifeguards.
“This is the first documented case of a turtle nesting on the west coast,” Justin Viezbicke, California stranding coordinator for NOAA Fisheries, told the Guardian.
Three days later, at about 7 p.m., a second olive ridley came ashore and nested near Huntington Beach Pier, around 8 miles away.
With high surf forecast from tropical storms, scientists dug up both nests on Sept. 25 and moved between 100 and 200 eggs to the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach, where they are being incubated under controlled conditions.
Olive ridleys normally nest in Baja California, Mexico, and the closest documented sites are near Todos Santos. NOAA says warm sea surface temperatures from ongoing marine heatwaves are the likely reason these two turned up so far north, and notes the species is naturally nomadic and highly migratory.
The temperature the eggs are kept at matters more than most people realize, because it decides whether the hatchlings are male or female.
“After about 87.8°F, they’re almost all female,” said Lance Adams, a veterinarian at the Aquarium of the Pacific.
The eggs usually take 45 to 60 days to hatch. If they do, the young turtles will be released on the beaches where their mothers laid them to make their own way across the sand to the ocean.
Sea turtles tend to come back to nest where they hatched, so if any of these hatchlings survive to adulthood, California could see them again in about 15 years.
