After 52 days of incubation, two loggerhead turtles came to light at two in the morning this Friday in the Calblanque Regional Park, where most of the eggs laid by the female known as ‘Borgia’ on July 4 in Isla Plana (Cartagena), informs LA VERDAD the Ministry of Environment, Mar Menor, Universities and Research.
The technicians of the Autonomous Community hope that in the next few days the rest of the loggerhead turtles will hatch from this clutch of 117 eggs, the fourth in the Region of Murcia after those registered in Calblanque (2019), La Manga and Cala Honda. (Calnegre, on the Lorca coast), the latter two in 2020.
This same summer, on August 10, another loggerhead turtle also laid 117 eggs in the sands of Cala Negrete (Calblanque, on the Cartagena coast), which brought the number of nestings of ‘Caretta caretta’ to five on the coast of the Region of Murcia during the last five years.
The first two loggerhead turtles of this season, which weighed 17 grams each, have been transferred to the El Valle Wildlife Recovery Center (Murcia) for review. Both will form part of a ‘head-starting’ program, which consists of their breeding in captivity and in controlled conditions in order to achieve a weight that reduces the risk of predation that this species has during its first months of life, informs this newspaper the regional government. They will be released into the sea in about a year, when they weigh just over a kilo.
The turtles born in the nests located in 2019 and 2020 (21 from Cala Arturo, Calblanque, Cartagena; 42 from La Manga, in San Javier; and four from Cala Honda, Calnegre, in Lorca) have already undergone the technique of ‘ head-starting’, after which a total of 67 turtles over one year of age were reintroduced into the environment.
This summer has been an exceptional season for the loggerhead turtle with the detection of 26 nests on the Spanish Mediterranean coasts, recalls the Ministry, two of them in the Region of Murcia.
From the General Directorate of the Natural Environment it is recommended that, in the case of seeing a sea turtle or its traces, the most important thing is not to disturb the animal; keep out of its field of vision and do not take flash photos or dazzle the specimen; stay more than 20 meters away and avoid stepping on or erasing the tracks; and locate a reference in the area before calling 112 to report what happened and the location. These works carried out are part of a program co-financed with European funds Feder.
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