It was a day full of surprises.
When anglers Carter Andrews and Chase Cornell started drifting live crabs over a reef, they didn’t expect to pull up a mangrove snapper, let alone a 10-pound behemoth.
Back at the dock, when they cleaned that fish they were shocked by what they found in its stomach: seven baby sea turtles.
Their tale reveals just how brutal — and short — life can be for baby sea turtles in Florida, which are in peak hatching mode at the moment. At night, hatchlings can be lured to their deaths by urban lights or gobbled up by foxes, raccoons and feral cats. By day, fire ants sting them to death and seagulls snatch them from the sand.
And if they’re lucky enough to shimmy their way into the surf, a murderer’s row of marine predators such as snook, tarpon and mahi-mahi await. Now you can add mangrove snapper to the list. The Florida Wildlife Commission estimates that only 1 in every 1,000 sea turtles born on Florida’s beaches survives to adulthood.
Andrews, who hosts the fishing show The Obsession of Carter Andrews, and Cornell set out of Sebastian Inlet and headed about six miles off shore to an artificial reef in 65 feet of water. Though they were targeting one of Andrews’ favorite game fish, the permit, when Cornell pulled up the 10-pound mangrove snapper, they were both elated with the size of the fish. “A three-pounder is big in most places,” said Andrews. This fish was special.
By the looks of its distended belly, it had been feasting with abandon.
Andrews rarely keeps game fish, but once in a while he’ll take one home for dinner. “This one made the cut,” he said. When he got to the dock, some fellow anglers were there cleaning smaller snapper.
One of them spotted him strolling up with the 10-pound beast and said, “Boy, don’t come in here, don’t come in here! You’re gonna make me look bad.”
“I threw that snapper down and when we cut it open and those turtles came out, those guys were just like, ‘I don’t know where you were, but this is wrong. I cannot believe he’s been eating turtles!’ “
Andrews and Cornell couldn’t either.
All told, there were seven baby turtles in the mangrove snapper’s stomach. Whitney Crowder, sea turtle rehabilitation coordinator at Gumbo Limbo Coastal Stewards in Boca Raton, took a look at Andrews’ photos and identified the relatively fresh turtles as two loggerheads and five green turtles.
Andrews, who’s fished in 30 countries and caught hundreds of species of fish, was amazed, in part, because snappers aren’t known to feed near the surface, where baby sea turtles take shelter in sargassum patches. When young, mangrove snapper tuck under inshore mangroves, and when older, they move off shore and hunker down near bottom.
He’d seen photos of mahi-mahi with bellies full of baby turtles, which made sense — they cruise near the surface. But for a snapper to key in on surface prey in 65 feet of water was, to Andrews, shocking.
“There’s no doubt that that snapper was coming up to the surface and eating those turtles,” Andrews said. “It’s dangerous for baby turtles to swim down [in deeper water.] … It makes you realize how these fish can learn behavior. Every day I’m amazed by different things I see [on the ocean].”
Millions of years of survival
There are five sea turtle species found in Florida. The green, leatherback, hawksbill and Kemp’s ridley are listed as endangered and the loggerhead is listed as threatened.
Sea turtles typically nest from May to October in Florida. Females come ashore in the region where they were born, but not necessarily the same beach, said Emily Turla, an associate lab coordinator at Florida Atlantic University studying turtle nesting.
They lay multiple clutches of 80 to 120 eggs each, bury them, and return to the sea.
After a two-month incubation period, the eggs hatch together, generally at night or early morning, and babies head toward the lightest section of sky, which on a natural beach would be the ocean horizon. Light from Florida’s more developed areas often lure them toward civilization, where they can die of dehydration or fall prey to various predators.
Organizations such as The Audubon Society, Fort Lauderdale’s STOP (Sea Turtle Oversight Protection) and STAR (Sea Turtle Assistance and Rescue) work to shepherd wayward hatchlings to the sea.
If the turtles are able to reach the water, they’re easy prey for not only mangrove snapper, but also snook, tarpon and jacks that cruise the beaches, and cobia, tripletail and mahi-mahi farther off shore. Even when grown, they can fall prey to several shark species.
Fish have been eating baby sea turtles for 40 million years, which may explain why females lay so many eggs. It also means sea turtles have been pretty successful — until now. Human influence adds a crushing burden. Boat strikes take a toll, as does litter. Adult turtles mistake balloons for jellyfish, and juvenile turtles are ingesting hundreds of pieces of microplastic, which have become omnipresent in open-ocean ecosystems, according to Crowder.
“In the Gulf Stream habitat, these turtles are just foraging and finding whatever they can, which is tiny little critters that live in the weed line. Plastic is found in large numbers [there],” she said. “The plastic starts smelling like food because it’s out there in the ocean. It starts growing algae on it. And we do know that they think it’s food. We’re literally finding every single small turtle that comes into our facility has guts full of plastic.”
This can cause the turtles to die of starvation or suffer fatal digestive tract perforations. If a turtle in the Gumbo Limbo Rehabilitation Center rehab center dies, the nonprofit Coastal Stewards helps them perform necropsies and document what kinds of plastics the turtles are ingesting. Recently, one of the weeks-old green sea turtles that they examined had 344 pieces of plastic in the intestinal tract.
The heat is on
Additionally, this summer has been particularly hot and dry, and some researchers suspect that has led to low hatch rates.
“This season, compared to last season, eggs just aren’t even hatching. Embryos die during development because it’s too hot for them to handle,” said Turla, the FAU lab coordinator.
Even though there are some record nesting numbers this year, she said, that’s not the whole picture. “Sure there are a lot of nests out there,” she said, “but they’re not developing.”
Turla and her supervisor, Dr. Jeanette Wyneken, are in the midst of studying how — as with alligators — nest temperatures determine the hatchlings’ sex.
Florida’s warm sands historically produce more female than male turtles, but in recent years, including this summer, Wyneken and her team are seeing hatchling populations that are 100% female, a new trend in their 20-year study that could have a negative impact on future populations.
Research from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association indicates that the average annual temperature in Broward County since 1980 has gradually risen from 74.2 degrees to 76.7 degrees, and Environmental Protection Agency data shows that the rate of temperature change since 1901 in coastal South Florida is 2.82 degrees per century. If these trends continue, Florida’s turtle nests could be jeopardized.
As for that corpulent mangrove snapper who met his fate on Andrews’ boat, “They were huge filets, man,” said Andrews. “I pan-seared it with blackened seasoning, and my girls’ favorite way when I do that is to put some avocado and salsa and black beans and rice. It was delicious.”
This story was produced in partnership with the Florida Climate Reporting Network, a multi-newsroom initiative founded by the Miami Herald, the South Florida Sun Sentinel, The Palm Beach Post, the Orlando Sentinel, WLRN Public Media and the Tampa Bay Times.
