Scales & Tales with
Contributing Writer Sophie Mckee
Hello everyone, Sophie here. I've been insanely busy this summer so here's an article I wrote a few years ago when I was 12 years old. Hope you still like it.
This month’s cold-blooded creature is the awesome loggerhead turtle. This is the largest hard-shelled turtle on earth and the world’s second largest sea turtle. The average loggerhead weighs between 200 to 400 pounds but the biggest one ever was 1201 pounds! That’s a lot of growing for something that starts out the size of a ping pong ball.
Loggerhead turtles are found in the warm parts of the oceans all over the world. They can live up to 80 years and mostly eat crabs and shrimp, but also jellyfish and sometimes seaweed. They can even eat the Portuguese man-o-war, which is one of the most venomous jellyfish on earth. No one is exactly sure how they are able to do this but that makes them one tough turtle.
The loggerhead is the most common sea turtle found in Florida. If you cruise up and down our beaches on a boat, you have a good chance to see one swimming on the surface, but they don’t like to be near people very much and dive quickly.
Their nesting season is happening right now and they lay about 120 eggs every two years. The females return to the same beach where they hatched and dig their nests around the full moons.
They cover the eggs, which really do look exactly like soft ping pong balls, with about a foot of sand and then head right back to the water. After that, the eggs are on their own. If they are not dug up by people, raccoons, or coyotes, the babies will hatch about 50 days later.
Unfortunately, only about one in a thousand baby sea turtles will survive to adulthood.
Loggerheads and their cousins the green sea turtles were once nearly wiped out because of hunting for their meat, which was popular for turtle soup. People also really liked to eat their eggs. All sea turtle species have been protected by law in the US since 1973.
After that happened, their numbers have bounced back, but the loggerhead is still considered a threated species. You’ll go to jail for a long time if they catch you hurting one of these turtles.
The loggerhead in the photo with me was a big female from Manasota Key. We came across this turtle heading back to the water after laying her eggs just before sunrise. We were super lucky because they usually do this in the middle of the night. This is the first sea turtle anyone in my family has ever seen on land, and my dad has been a fisherman for a really long time.
The beach at Manasota Key has more turtle nests than anywhere else in Florida. They were everywhere and we saw new tracks every morning. The other photo shows what these tracks look like. There are lots of volunteers up there who check on the nests and make sure that nothing disturbs them. They also make sure that once the baby turtles hatch as many of them make it to the water as possible.
It was really cool to see one of these big reptiles up close and I hope you get to see one someday, too. I’ll be back next month with another awesome cold-blooded Florida creature.
Sophie Mckee
Oasis High School, Cape Coral
