Helicopter parent?
Not my mom.
Free-range parent?
Not my mom either.
I grew up with a lot of nurture and also abundant freedom to better my nature. So maybe you could say I grew more like a whale calve than a loggerhead hatchling.
Loggerheads are totally free-range. They mate. The male swims. The female nests and the hatchlings emerge from the nest to fend for themselves and, if triumphant, repeat the cycle.
This concept in Mother nature, alien to my experience, fascinates me.
As a kid playing with my siblings, I acted out adventures of fending for ourselves in a forest, on a river or atop a mountain, but we only went so far before the dinner call sounded and brought us back home.
Now I imagine the lives of loggerhead sea turtles, the nesting female and the emerging hatchling.
The loggerhead may be the most abundant sea turtle species in the United States but the species, depending on the region, is threatened and protected.
Threats include incidental capture in longline fishing, shrimp trawling, pollution, predation of nests and human disturbances such as coastal lighting and housing development. Another major threat is the loss of nesting habitat due to coastal development, which makes safeguarding our shoreline vital.
On Anna Maria Island, the nesting activity seems so abundant that it might be easy to overlook the fact there are only 40,000-50,000 nesting females in the world, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources, which lists loggerheads as “vulnerable,” facing a high risk of extinction in the wild in the near future.
The turtles feed primarily on shellfish, and the females nest every two to four years.
A nest, typically dug in the sand between the dune front and high tide line, contains an average 100-126 eggs that incubate about 60 days.
When hatchlings emerge from nests, usually at night, they scramble across the sand, avoiding predators, to reach the water and swim for their survival.
The mama turtle’s “parenting” is done when the nest gets covered with sand.
But to protect the survival of the species, the loggerhead lays numerous clutches of eggs in locations miles apart.
A recent University of South Florida study, published in the journal Scientific Reports, found that some female loggerheads lay as many as six clutches as far as 6 miles apart during the same breeding season.
“Nesting females don’t lay all their eggs in one basket,” USF-St. Petersburg professor Deby Cassill said. She’s the author of the study. “Their reproductive strategy is like investing in a mutual fund. Females divide their resources among many stocks rather than investing in a single stock.”
In a lifetime, one mama loggerhead might produce 4,200 eggs and place them at 40 sites on a single barrier island, according to Cassill’s research based on 17 years of data from the Conservancy of Southwest Florida.
The strategy reduces the risk of reproductive failure due to storms that could wash out clutches and improves the hatchling survival rate.
Free-range parenting?
Totally.
Maternal instinct?
Yep.