Root’s Story

Another wonderful day with Mr. Mark Dodd, Sea Turtle Biologist for Georgia Department of Natural Resources (DNR) on Sapelo Island, Georgia! We went to Sapelo Island on August 3, 2017 to do a sea turtle nest survey. My dad and I woke up at 5:00 am, packed our bag, and set off for the coast. To get to Sapelo Island, we had to go by boat. Then, when we arrived on the island, we had to take an ATV through a lot of trees until we saw a huge dune. We finally got to the beach! Yay! Let the sea turtle nest sampling begin! We checked every nest and looked for new ones that were laid the night before. There were a LOT of nests on Sapelo!

During one of our nest surveys where we counted the number of hatched and unhatched eggs, the biologist saw something. It was a little sea turtle hatchling. Oh my! The little sea turtle was caught on the plant roots that had grown into the nest. This nest had a 50% hatching success, which means only half of the eggs hatched successfully. This is lower than usual and was probably due to the vegetation. Mr. Mark helped the hatchling out of the nest, washed off the sand, and put it on the beach to crawl its way to the ocean. We decided to name the little sea turtle “Root” since he or she (we don’t know the gender) was caught in roots.

That is Root’s story.

Special thanks to Mr. Mark Dodd for inviting me to come on this wonderful trip!

And thank you for reading Root’s Story!

Root said, “Thank you!”