While sea turtles stay in the waters off San Diego, they don’t truly lay eggs right here.
IMPERIAL BEACH, Calif. — Experts are wanting right into a thriller found in Imperial Beach. A person strolling on the seashore this morning says he needed to scare away sea gulls from peaking at thriller eggs. He known as lifeguards and so they took the eggs away in buckets of sand.
CBS 8 despatched photos and video of the eggs to Sheila Madrak, assistant professor of Biology at San Diego Miramar College. Madrak received her PhD finding out the ocean turtles that stay in San Diego Bay.
“When I first heard that there have been potential eggs, I used to be fairly skeptical. Then once I noticed the video I believed, yeah, these appear to be sea turtle eggs to me. They have the form, they’ve the feel, the character that they might have if that they had lately hatched or washed up,” Madrak mentioned.
The egg shells have been strewn alongside in the seaweed. Sea turtles sometimes nest alongside the Baja California Sur coast, far south of Imperial Beach, from June via September. The child turtles hatch weeks later. Madrak says, “Although it’s certainly possible, it’s not probably that they were from a local nest. Where they appear to be found in the seaweed, to me it looks like they washed up. From where? I don’t know. Typically once sea turtle eggs are submerged in sea water, they are no longer viable.”
While sea turtles stay in the waters off San Diego, they don’t truly lay eggs right here. “This is a little cold for nesting beaches,” Madrak mentioned.
According to NOAA, “The temperature of the growing eggs is what decides whether or not the offspring can be male or feminine. This known as temperature-dependent intercourse willpower, or TSD.”
Research reveals that if a turtle’s eggs incubate beneath 81.86° Fahrenheit, the turtle hatchlings can be male. If the eggs incubate 88.8° Fahrenheit, the hatchlings can be feminine. Temperatures that fluctuate between the 2 extremes will produce a mixture of female and male child turtles.
“With local weather change, it’s very regarding. If these temperatures get too heat, you might have all feminine nests. And that is one thing we’re seeing popping out of Florida. They’re seeing predominantly feminine nests. If you might have solely feminine turtles that’s not going to be very productive for the populations long run,” Madrak mentioned.
But on the East Coast, scientists are beginning to see turtles nest additional North. The turtles are in search of the fitting temperature for his or her nests. Madrak says this might be an vital discovery in Imperial Beach. She says, “It is conceivable that we may see the same thing on the western United States where nests are actually a little too warm in Baja and you might see some individuals who are less experienced nesters potentially try to lay a little further north. So that’s not out of the realm of possibility.”
The Imperial Beach lifeguards took the eggs away and we’re truly attempting to trace them down so NOAA can check them. Through genetic testing they will discover out what sort of turtle it’s and the place it lives. The turtles that stay off San Diego Bay are genetically totally different than the turtles that stay round Hawaii.
If you suppose you notice turtle eggs strolling alongside the seashore, name the lifeguards. And contact NOAA. It’s a federal offense to own turtle eggs as a result of they’re endangered.
So, are these Imperial Beach eggs from a neighborhood turtle? A turtle who nested right here? Or are they from eggs that washed all the way in which up from the coast of Baja California Sur?
“There are a lot of various things that would have occurred. We don’t know effectively sufficient to say definitively they completely would by no means nest right here. Given the very fact we’ve got turtles in the waters off our shores, in our bays right here, it’s actually inside the realm of chance {that a} turtle found its means, ended up depositing a nest, and so they hatched out,” Madrak mentioned.
WATCH RELATED: Del Mar Beach closed after swimmer survives shark assault (Nov. 2022).
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