After years of problems from weather to oil spills, it appears that the Florida Loggerhead nesting numbers are booming!

Loggerhead nesting statewide was almost the highest since monitoring began in 1989, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission said Friday. In total, surveyors counted 58,172 loggerhead nests on the state's “index” beaches, second only to the peak seen in 1998.

Just five years ago, nesting on those same beaches hit a low of 28,074 and prompted widespread concerns about the status of the turtle.

“We're pleased to see this increase, but we recognize that loggerheads, and other sea turtle species, still face many challenges,” Blair Witherington, a commission research scientist, said Friday.

The majority of loggerhead nesting in the United States — 90% — occurs in Florida, especially along the east coast.

The even better news is that nesting season is still going until mid-November. To read the full article, click here.

A group of juvenile Desert Tortoises has been released in Nevada in efforts to track their movements to make relocations more successful in the future.

"Habitat destruction is one of the biggest threats facing desert tortoises in the wild," said Jennifer Germano Ph.D., post-doctoral researcher at the Desert Tortoise Conservation Center. "Currently we are using translocations as an experimental tool to help minimize some of the impacts to tortoise populations. Tracking this group of young tortoises will allow us to better understand how these animals respond to translocation, which will help us improve recovery efforts for this species in the future."

A transmitter has been placed on each of the tortoises to allow researchers to track the movements and health of the juvenile reptiles (ranging in age from 3 to 8 years). Translocations have recently been recommended for tortoises impacted by regional habitat disturbances due to energy project development and as a tool to augment depleted populations. Through this effort, researchers hope to better understand what factors improve long-term survival for individuals and how they can improve the tools they use for the conservation management of this species.

To read the full article, click here.

And last, the grillnet industry is on a course to continue killing sea turtles despite the Leatherback's listing as state marine reptile in California.

Longlining along California’s coast has been banned due its high bycatch of non-target animals, including federally protected marine mammals and endangered species.

The California drift gillnet fishery targets swordfish and thresher shark using nets that stretch a mile in length. But obviously this fishing method collects life indiscriminately from the ocean, resulting in the death or injury (a death sentence in the wild) of more than 130 protected whales, dolphins, seal and sea lions and thousands of other sharks and marine mammals, according to the Sea Turtle Restoration Project.

Anything taken aboard other than a swordfish or shark is dumped back into the ocean – dead, alive or dying.

“Curtains of death, in the form of the California driftnet fishery, should be abolished in California waters and need to be phased out as soon as possible,” biologist and executive director of SeaTurtles.org, Todd Steiner said. “Sea turtles, sharks and whales are all being hammered by this fishery that targets high-mercury seafood species that are largely unfit to eat.”

To read the full article, click here.