Orange Beach, AL – (OBA) – A wet turtle season – because of rain and an active Gulf – produced some of the lowest numbers in the past few years for loggerhead sea turtle hatchlings. And most of those were likely males, Lead Biologist Elizabeth Bevan of Share Beach said.

“We get hot chicks from warm temperatures and cool dudes from cooler temperatures,” Bevan said with a laugh. “That temperature that gives you about a 50-50 sex ratio, half male, half female in the nest and that particular threshold is determined by lots of studies. The pivotal temperature for that 50-50 sex ratio our temperatures were below that for almost the entire season. I think there were only 14 days where our average sand temperature was even at that temperature. We were definitely cool.”

Bevan said the optimal temperature for the 50-50 split is 29 C or about 84.2 F. Share the Beach monitors the beach daily during the May 1-Oct. 31 turtle season with teams of volunteers in Orange Beach, Gulf Shores, Gulf State Park and Fort Morgan.

“Our temperatures were definitely at the male producing range so most likely all of the hatchlings that we did get off the beach this year were all little males,” Bevan said.

Those cooler temps in the sand made for longer nesting times, too, before the turtles hatch and head south.

“One of the interesting things I thought was an indicator of what happened because we had all this rain our temperatures in the sand were definitely much cooler than you would anticipate,” Bevan said. “Last year incubation time was about 56 days on average. This year it was 63 days.”

And although no serious storms visited our slice of paradise this year, the volume of storms caused churning waters to all of the Gulf Coast and that cooled some nests and washed others away.

“This year we did have a bunch of them that were washed off, about half, but it wasn’t necessarily any one direct hit from a storm,” Bevan said. “But every week we had lots of rain showers so a really wet season. And we also had just the indirect effect from a bunch of storms throughout the rest of the Gulf. It wasn’t directly on us but any storm enters the Gulf and it’s like a giant bowl and everything just gets stirred up.”

Here are stats from the last two seasons and from the biggest season on record:

• 2021: 66 nests, 1,818 hatchlings to the water

• 2020: 99 nests, 3,871 hatchlings to the water

• 2016: 235 nests, 13,646 hatchlings to the water