Beach Cleanup & Loggerhead Turtles

Today Becky and I helped 160 other people collect 445 pounds of trash from Jupiter Beach. Then we visited the Loggerhead Marine Center.

Beach Cleanup

The first Saturday of each month volunteers meet to pick up trash others have left behind, as well as what has washed ashore. The event has been underway for 20+ years and has many sponsors.

Keep America Beautiful and these companies and organizations sponsor
the monthly Jupiter Beach Cleanup. It is organized by Friends of Jupiter Beach

Our backs thank
this handy pickup
tool.

The organizers supplied gloves, plastic bags to carry the trash and one of those handy pickup tools (see pic) that lets you deftly pick things out of the sand without bending over, and over, and over.


We organized into teams of 8-10 people and each team was assigned a segment of beach to cleanup. Just like "police call" I remember from my Army days, we walked along the beach picking up cigarette butts, every kind of plastic -- hair barrettes, bottle caps, plastic bags, plastic forks and spoons, shower curtain rings, you name it -- as well as broken glass bottles, beer cans, Dunkin Donut and Taco Bell debris and so much more. We learned later that plastic doesn't biodegrade. It photo-degrades and eventually breaks into small pieces that are ingested by marine life.

Highway A1A is a Florida State Road that runs along the Atlantic Ocean. The Southern-most end terminates at  Key West, while the Northern terminus is at Fernandina Beach, just south of Georgia on Amelia Island. It is designated the A1A Scenic and Historic Coastal Highway. (Last week Becky drove us about 65 miles South on A1A so we could have dinner in Ft. Lauderdale). Jupiter Beach runs along A1A with a dense strip of mangrove separating the road from the beach.

Mangrove trees act as buffers between the land and the sea. They prevent soil
erosion and because they grow aggressively, they can actually "reclaim"
land area as they grow toward the sea. 

Headin' toward the beach...

In about an hour of picking and grabbing junk and trash from the sand we reconvened for coffee, bagels, all kinds of baked goodies, lemonade and conversation with people we'd met. It was a nice way to spend the 8-10AM segment of the day. Hey, we even got some great T-shirts!

Loggerhead Marine Center

The LMC is a hospital for turtles that have been injured and need rehabilitation before being released back to the sea. It has a fully equipped veterinary hospital authorized to treat endangered loggerhead, green, hawksbill, leatherback and Kemp's ridley turtles. We saw turtles that had been injured by boat propellers, bitten by ocean predators and tangled in fishing line. A few had flippers amputated due to their injuries. Others were being treated for problems ranging from diverticulosus to anemia.

Here is a typical case, Anna Belle, who was brought to the Marine Center with propeller wounds. And below is Anna Belle's "turtle cam" that updates every ten seconds.

Anna Belle's "turtle cam."

Along Jupiter Beach you'll find pink wooden stakes randomly driven into the sand. Each one marks a turtle nest filled with about 120 eggs. The turtles hatch between May and October. We're told there are night-time vigils where people gather under the moonlight to watch the baby turtles head across the sand to reach the sea. Male turtles never return to land for the remainder of their 80 to 100 year lifetime. Females return only to lay eggs.  It's quite an amazing story.