ASCEA and CASTEL VOLTURNO, Italy, and BARCELONA, Spain — In the early hours of a warm July day, regular rows of still-folded sun umbrellas stand along the shores of Castel Volturno, a coastal town in the Italian region of Campania, located about 35 kilometers (22 miles) northwest of Naples. A small group gathers around a control screen while a drone flies along the coast, searching for tractor-like tracks emerging from the waves. At the slightest sign, group members will quickly reach the location and fence off the area. Summer is the nesting season for the loggerhead sea turtle (Caretta caretta). Loggerheads inhabit warm portions of the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian oceans, as well as the Mediterranean Sea. However, despite its broad range, the species is listed as vulnerable to extinction by the IUCN. These large marine reptiles spend roughly two decades maturing at sea before the females return to land — usually to the same beaches where they hatched — to lay their own eggs. Historically, loggerhead nesting in the Mediterranean has been concentrated in the warm sands of the sea’s eastern and central basins — primarily in Greece, Türkiye, and Cyprus — while the western basin has served mainly as a foraging ground by juvenile turtles. But over the past five decades, increasing numbers of nests have begun to appear in the western basin, including on the shores of Italy, France, and Spain. Researcher Fulvio Maffucci pilots a drone use to find loggerhead sea turtle (Caretta caretta) nesting sites.…This article was originally published on Mongabay

From Conservation news via This RSS Feed.