By JON MOOALLEMNew York Times
Loggerhead nesting season started this year, as usual, in May. Across the northeastern coast of the Gulf of Mexico, female sea turtles began plodding out of the water and up the beach, each burying a clutch of a hundred or more leathery eggs beneath the sand. The eggs incubate for about 60 days. Then a throng of tiny black loggerhead hatchlings, each only about two inches long, frantically boils out of the ground, all paddling clumsily with their outsize, winglike flippers. They scuttle down the beach en masse, capitalizing on a one-time frenzy of energy to rush into the water and push past the breakers into offshore currents. Once they make it there — if they make it there — they typically find their way onto mats of seaweed called sargassum. The hatchlings will drift passively around the ocean on this sargassum for the first several years of their lives, like children inner-tubing in a swimming pool. It’s a life raft from which, conveniently, they can also pluck snacks. Many turtles wind up gliding around the Florida peninsula and floating as far out as the Azores during a developmental stage biologists call “the lost years.”
