Sea Turtles
Photo by: unknown from Pexels
Photo by and from: Australian Institute of Marine Science
Photo by: unkown from Flickr
Threats
Threats to sea turtles include damage to nesting, accidental capture while fishing, and being hit by boats. One way that NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Adminostration) has reduced this threat was by developing TED (turtle exculder devices). A TED is a grid of bars at the bottom or top of a shrimp net, angled with a flap at the top. This makes it so that if a turtle accidentally get caught in the net, they can escape through a TED flap.
Nesting
Although sea turtles spend most of their lives in the ocean, adult female turtles return to beaches to lay eggs. They usually do this at night. Females crawl out of the ocean, and pause frequently as if she's scoping out her spot. She then finds a dry part of the beach and flings lose peices of sand away with her flippers. by digging with her flipers and rotating her body, she construts a "body pit". Once the body pit is conplete, she uses her cupped rear flippers as shovels to dig an egg cavity. This egg cavity is shaped a little bit like a tear drop and is usually slightly tilted. When the turle is finished digging the egg chamber, she starts to lay her eggs.