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Can we get a quote from Dave (or Jill) from his video to put here on why it's important to understand the gender?

- Some sea turtle professional

The Conservancy has worked to protect over 300,000 hatchlings over the last 38 season. <Or some other really cool fact we haven't used 800 more times>

Hatchling Sex Ratio Study

Collaboration

Entering its 13 year in 2016, this is a cooperative effort with staff from the Rookery Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve. The objective of this project is to determine the sex ratio of hatchlings it is influenced by rain, flooding and nest location.

We can do this because the sex of sea turtles is determined by nest incubation temperature during the middle third of the 55-day incubation period.

A higher nest temperature results in more females while lower temperature causes a shift toward males. Guests to the Nature Center an get an easy mnemonic device to remember this fact: "Hot chicks and cool dudes."

Data Loggers

Data loggers are placed in a number of nests each year. These devices take temperature measurements inside the nest during the incubation period to help the teams determine the gender ratio of a given number of nests each year.
As ambient air temperatures rise we can expect nest temperatures to do the same, ultimately producing more females than males. Our research efforts on Keewaydin show us that the island produces a sizable portion of cooler, male dominated nests. Though we may not have as high a density of nests as many other beaches in Florida, these male producing beaches are critical to the survival of loggerhead sea turtles.
Placing Temperature Data Logger In Loggerhead Nest Keewaydin Is., FL 2011