Mark your calendars and grab your gear—Memorial Day weekend is just around the corner, and the sea turtles are here! Are you ready for summer? How about your gear? Whether it’s equipment or tanks, Jupiter Dive Center’s full-service department is ready to handle all your equipment needs, with quick turnaround times so you won’t miss a single turtle!
Maintaining your equipment is critical to diver safety
Divers depend on their equipment for survival at depth, so it is staggering to consider how many risk their safety by not properly maintaining their equipment according to industry standards.
Seawater is corrosive, and Florida is humid—neither is an ideal environment for equipment. Throw in a dusty garage, and well, you get the picture. And while there is a lot divers can do to ensure the integrity of their equipment (starting with thoroughly rinsing their gear, and visually inspecting it frequently), there’s no substitute for an annual service by one of our certified technicians. Your preventative measures, plus our professional service, mean you can be confident that your equipment will give you years of safe use, so you can enjoy your dives with confidence.
Now let’s talk sea turtles!
The nine-mile stretch of sand off Jupiter just happens to be one of the world’s premier sea turtle nesting sites! That means you’ll have plenty of opportunities to encounter sea turtles while diving. Five species call this area home—loggerhead, hawksbill, green, leatherback, and Ridley—and all are considered endangered, which makes every encounter extra special.
Loggerhead sea turtles are the most common sea turtle in Florida. Their head is not only a nod to their name, but it’s the easiest way to identify them. Simply put, compared to other sea turtles, they’ve got bigger heads, which, like their carapaces, are reddish brown.
Loggerheads weigh in between 200 and 350 pounds and typically measure about three feet in length. Like all sea turtles, loggerheads are cold-blooded blooded so warm water is critical to their survival, and they can be found throughout coastal waters.
The Sea Turtle Life Cycle
Sea turtle eggs incubate in warm sand for approximately two months before baby sea turtles hatch. These hatchlings almost always emerge at night and instinctively dart toward the ocean and swim until they find a raft of sargassum to hide within. Hatchlings are vulnerable and face many hazards. Biologists believe that less than one in 1,000 sea turtles survive to adulthood.
Little is known about sea turtles’ first five to ten years of life, but once they reach sexual maturity, natal homing kicks in and guides the adult sea turtles to the beach where they were born to find a mate and for the female to lay her eggs. When ready, female turtles haul themselves onto the beach under the cover of darkness, dig a nest in the sand above the high-tide mark, and lay a clutch of eggs that typically averages between 40 and 200 eggs.
Once finished, female sea turtles will remain offshore for a few weeks before returning to the beach to lay another clutch of eggs. They may repeat this cycle as many as seven times per season before departing to return to their foraging grounds, which may be hundreds of miles away.
The Role Sea Turtles Play in the Ecosystem
Ecosystems are complicated. They are defined as biological communities of interacting organisms and their physical environments. Affecting one organism in the system can create a domino effect throughout the rest of the system. Sea turtles spend most of their lives at sea, but as you just read, they come onto land to nest. Therefore, their activity contributes to marine, beach, and dune ecosystems.
First, let’s look at the ocean. Near shore, sea grass beds support a diverse ecosystem. Sea turtles graze on sea grasses, which not only helps the grass thrive, but when digested by the turtles, the eliminated nutrients from the grasses are returned and used by other organisms.
A bit further out are the coral reefs where you’ll most likely encounter sea turtles while diving. Here, the hawksbill sea turtles take center stage as their diet consists mainly of sponges, which keeps the sponge population in check so they don’t choke out the corals.
If we head back onshore to the beach and dunes, we’ll find a lot of sand and a low-nutrient system with sparse vegetation. But it is precisely that vegetation that prevents beach erosion. And those eggs the female sea turtles lay? Not every egg hatches. Those that don’t provide needed nutrients in the ground promote more vegetation.
Want to know more about the other sea turtles? Check out our Sea Turtle Specialty course!
And now that we’ve piqued your curiosity about sea turtles, it’s time to collect your serviced gear and get ready for a whole summer’s worth of adventures with Jupiter Dive Center. Book your dive or call us at 561-745-7807 today!