With high tides and perilous surf conditions forecast for the weekend, federal and local agencies monitoring the sea turtle nests laid last week in Huntington Beach and Seal Beach made the “difficult” decision to relocate the eggs, according to a joint statement released Friday.
A team of biologists working in the early morning hours Friday collected the olive ridley sea turtle eggs and transferred them to the Aquarium of the Pacific, the agencies said.
The Orange County turtle nests are several hundred miles farther north than the turtles have ever been seen nesting before.
The eggs will remain at the aquarium for the remainder of their 45- to 60-day incubation period. If viable, they should hatch around the first week of November.
The nests, which appeared on Sept. 16 in Seal Beach and Sept. 19 in Huntington Beach, are the first known naturally-occurring sea turtle nests on the U.S. West Coast.
The turtles are olive ridleys, an olive-green, heart-shaped sea turtle that is listed as a threatened animal under the Endangered Species Act. They are normally found throughout tropical regions of the Pacific, Indian and Atlantic oceans, and usually nest along the coasts of Mexico, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Panama.
Before last week, the farthest known northern nesting ground was in the Mexican state of Baja California Sur.
The olive ridleys chose two particularly high-traffic spots to deposit their eggs. The Huntington Beach nest was near a section of beach that will be blocked off Oct. 2-4 for the Pacific Airshow. The Seal Beach nest, located near the Surfside community, was adjacent to an area where sand berms are planned for the coming winter storms.
The California Coastal Commission, which last year granted the airshow a five-year operating permit, had reached out to both the cities and the event organizers to discuss the nests before the decision was made to remove the eggs.
“We’re going to work with all parties concerned to keep the nest as safe as we can. If there are super high storm tides, the berming and the air show may not be the biggest threat,” said Sarah Christie, legislative director at the California Coastal Commission on Thursday.
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