Sullivan's Nests 11 & 12 Inventoried
Nest 11 was found by Lowell Grosse and his friend Jim Newman on July 3 at Station 20. Because it was laid below the spring tide line, it was moved higher to a nearby dune where it incubated until August 22, 52 days later, when the first hatchlings were seen. It was a large clutch of 140 eggs. The inventory revealed 125 empty eggshells, 13 undeveloped eggs and no hatchlings live or dead. Hatch Success was 89.2%.
Nest 12 was laid on the small primary dune near Station 25 and was discovered by Kelsey Willey & Vatsa Kadaba on the morning of July 3. Since the turtle made it all the way up to the dune, we did not need to move the eggs. There used to be large dunes here, but erosion has taken away the tall ones and this low one is there now. We did not know how many were laid, but there were lots of tracks on the morning of August 25th, 53 days later, right after the Spacex rocket left a huge dramatic vapor trail in the sky at 5 am just before dawn.(Spacex photo taken by Vatsa Kadaba) It is always interesting to see the large container ships coming and going from the shore on Sullivan's with the sun shining on the Morris Island lighthouse and houses on Folly Beach. We counted 80 empty eggshells, 4 undeveloped eggs and 12 dead hatchlings. Two of the dead ones were fresh enough to take tissue samples for the paternity genetics research project. Perhaps the recent heavy rain showers caused them to drown just below the surface when they were about to emerge. The one live hatchling appeared to be blind. It crawled in circles, could not orient to the ocean after Haley Bailey released it to crawl, and got washed back when put into the water. It had to be released at Breach Inlet once the tide turned and was running out out to sea. Hatch Success was 94.1%. On some of the beach paths such as at Station 26, you might be lucky enough to see a beautiful pink native hibiscus plant called Salt Marsh Mallow blooming this time of year.
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