Henry Sulima, Vero Beach

Letter: Turtles uncanny ability to predict storm season proves fascinating, educational

How do sea turtles predict hurricanes? Thats what Peggy Ginhoven (June 12 letter) and others, are asking.

Having been a World War II Air Corps weatherman, I became interested in sea turtle predictions about 25 years ago when my wife and I decided to become permanent Florida residents.

Our favorite pastimes were walking the beaches in search of new turtle nests, visiting the protected, long-gone, turtle hatchery on South Beach, and participating in the free, annually held turtle nesting tours conducted by the Sebastian Inlet State Park Rangers office.

It was a memorable experience witnessing how precisely and where sea turtles decide to dig their nests to lay as many as 150 eggs at a time, then seeing the tiny hatchlings after 45-plus days of incubation, depending on the species, digging out for days, from under about 30 inches of sand, and struggling to reach the ocean. Unfortunately, not many make it beyond the reefs.

The Treasure Coast nesting season runs from about mid-May until about early August. The turtles make their hurricane season predictions about mid-July. Many Treasure Coast natives have been relying for generations, on sea turtles annual predictions. Where they built their nests tells us what kind of season we can expect.

Whenever sea water inundates nests, it usually destroys the buried eggs. So, if they bury their eggs between the base of a dune and the tide line, they are telling us to expect a quiet season. If many more nests are dug atop of the dunes than on the beaches, as when Hurricanes Frances, Jeanne and Wilma visited us in 2004-05, the turtles are saying we can expect an active hurricane season.

Myth? Who knows. We only know that the turtles batting average over the years has been proven to be better than humans.