Dedicated volunteers give baby turtles a fighting chance amid extreme weather threat

While many residents on Bribie Island were filling water bottles, tying down loose items, taping windows and staying indoors ahead of Ex-Cyclone Alfred, Darren Jew and a team of TurtleCare volunteers were out working urgently to protect turtle hatchlings still nestled in their eggs.

Sunshine Coast Council’s TurtleCare program is a community-based citizen science program for the monitoring and protection of nesting marine turtles from Bribie Island up to Buddina beach. The program operates in partnership with the Queensland Government’s Turtle Conservation Project.

Turtle conservation volunteers are highly trained citizen scientists who make an incredible contribution to the ongoing survival of marine turtles by monitoring nesting mothers, relocating nests if necessary for hatchling survival, and collecting essential data to support the protection of these majestic animals.

In the week prior to Ex-Cyclone Alfred, the Bribie Island TurtleCare team, led by Darren, relocated a staggering 20 nests, working over 200 hours to shift the eggs to higher ground before Alfred’s cyclonic winds, rain and swell hit the coast.

I was lucky enough to join Darren on the beach a couple of weeks after the ex-cyclone where we witnessed one of those nests hatch, spilling over 100 endangered baby loggerhead turtle hatchlings onto the sand and into the ocean. This was made even more special by it being a natural emergence, during daylight hours (hatchlings usually emerge at night!).

It is a sight unlike any other – freshly hatched turtles hauling themselves out of the nest and heading straight toward the ocean with a single-minded determination. Every dune and tyre track a mountain to climb, the wind and sand a tiny cyclone buffeting against their bodies, and the sea a frothing unknown waiting for them.

This incredible sight wouldn’t have been possible without the quick work of Darren and the team.

TurtleCare's primary objective is to leave nests in their natural state, however, this is not always feasible when nests are threatened by severe weather.

Extreme weather can have catastrophic impacts for turtles that already have the odds stacked against them to make it to adulthood. Some of these threats on Bribie Island include resident goanas, foxes and pigs, human activity, plastic pollution and the impacts of climate change including warming seas and coastal erosion.

On the Sunshine Coast, climate impacts including warmer temperatures and erosion are well known to affect turtles and the Sunshine Coast Council TurtleCare team have been monitoring sand temperatures and nest depth for more than 15 years. The temperature of the nest impacts the sex of turtles so warmer temperatures can result feminisation which is a greater likelihood of female hatchlings being produced.

A 2024 global meta-analysis found that “…due to sea-level rise, more than 50 % of the current nesting sites will become unsuitable over the next decades.”

In the 2022/2023 nesting season, TurtleCare volunteers on the Sunshine Coast relocated a staggering 8,391 out of 10,272 eggs due to dune erosion from intense storms during that period.

During my trip to Bribie Island, we visited multiple nesting sites and some required ladders to access them thanks to the erosion from ex-cyclone Alfred.

As we continue to see more frequent and intense weather thanks to climate change, the risk to turtles will only increase. We need urgent action from our government to tackle climate change.

In the meantime, the dedicated TurtleCare team will be doing all they can to give these tiny turtles the best chance and hopefully we’ll see some of them return in 30 years to lay their own nest.

All TurtleCare activities are conducted under Queensland Turtle Conservation Project permits.