Wild Nite
Press Release
Submitted by Kathy Brooks
[email protected]
November 13, 2018 3:24 p.m.
Mary Duffy, President of Amelia Island Sea Turtle Watch, will be the featured speaker at Wild Amelia’s Tuesday, November 13th Wild Nite—one of the nine-month series—at 7 p.m. at the Peck Center Auditorium, 516 S. 10th Street in Fernandina Beach. Ms. Duffy will give an update on the 2018 sea turtle nesting season on Amelia Island and in Florida. The program is free and open to the public.
For over two decades, Mary Duffy has led a group of committed volunteers—Amelia Island Sea Turtle Watch—to collect data about the loggerhead and occasional green and leatherback sea turtles that nest on Amelia Island. Volunteers walk the beaches at dawn looking for turtle tracks, verify and mark the nest, watch the nest for almost two months, confirm hatching, and then excavate to get exact numbers of shards, dead pips, and live hatchlings still in the nest. Each nest has about 100-150 eggs. The hatchlings that emerged from these nests some 50-60 days later will face peril as they make their way to the sea and once in the sea; it is thought that only one in 4000 will survive to adulthood! To learn more about the 2018 nesting season on Amelia and new genetic studies of the nesting turtles, to learn what you can do to help sea turtles survive and the work of the Amelia Island Sea Turtle Watch, come to “Update on Amelia’s Sea Turtles” on November 13th.
Wild Amelia’s mission is to educate residents and visitors about the local bioregion and encourage stewardship of the area’s natural resources through events and programs that educate and entertain while promoting a conservation ethic. Wild Amelia’s educational programs are year-round, culminating in a three-day Nature Festival on the third weekend in May; the 13th annual Festival will be held from May 17-19, 2019. For more information about Wild Amelia, please visit wildamelia.org and Wild Amelia on Facebook.