It's good for the baby turtles as long as it's floating but not when piled up at the beach a coating the shore line. In that case, the babies can't make it to water and they die or are picked off.
Sargasso.
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Does anyone KNOW if the sargassum beaches had a positive affect on turtles? The sex of the turtle is determined by incubation temperatures.
From oceanservice NOAA :
"The temperature of the developing eggs is what decides whether the offspring will be male or female. This is called temperature-dependent sex determination, or TSD. Research shows that if a turtle's eggs incubate below 81.86 Fahrenheit , the turtle hatchlings will be male."
So did sargassum insulate and raise the temp of incubation? I hope so.
From oceanservice NOAA :
"The temperature of the developing eggs is what decides whether the offspring will be male or female. This is called temperature-dependent sex determination, or TSD. Research shows that if a turtle's eggs incubate below 81.86 Fahrenheit , the turtle hatchlings will be male."
So did sargassum insulate and raise the temp of incubation? I hope so.
The mama turtle will try to crawl over the sargassum at the high tide line to get to a safe place on the beach where the high tide won't come. If she can't make it over the sargassum, she'll usually turn around and go back into the ocean. Many times she'll swim to another area and come back out to see if she's found a favorable place to nest. Other times she might just dump her eggs into the ocean, and because the egg shell is water permeable, the embryo will not develop. If the sargassum piles up in a nesting area, I suppose it could insulate the nest if it's thick enough. If the beach is hot you get "hot chicks", if it is a cooler beach you get "cool dudes." Fun way to remember sex determination in turtles since they don't possess X and Y chromosomes.
That's very true. They'll try like crazy to get up and over the sargassum. We had a lot of sargassum on our SE Florida beaches this year and were concerned about the hatchlings finding a way over it. Because hatchlings normally hatch out between dusk and dawn, there are fewer things to pick them off due to less light. If the sargassum is way off shore, it's a long arduous journey for the hatchlings and they have critters beneath the ocean and in the sky that see them as a tasty morsel. Thank goodness mama turtles (Loggerheads and Greens) lay multiple nests during nesting season and each nest may result in 80 to130+ eggs. Cozumel had around 7,400 nests this year. If each nest produced 100 live hatchlings, that would be 740,000 baby turtles! Whew....that's a lot of babies!
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