Loggerhead Sea Turtle

Lifestyle

Loggerheads are solitary, long-distance swimmers, able to travel one-third of the way around the world in search of rich feeding areas. They travel the farthest at the beginning of their lives, during their “pelagic” or “open sea” phase. This phase can last more than 15 years for some sea turtles. When they have grown big enough, they are ready to trade the open oceans for shallow waters, such as soft-bottom lagoons, hard-bottom limestone banks, coral reefs, and seagrass beds. To take a break from foraging, the turtles will rest in caves, crevices, coral heads, or even in shipwrecks. During winter months, they sometimes bury themselves under bottom sediments to hibernate. 

Food

With its large, heavy beak and powerful jaw muscles, the loggerhead is well adapted to its diet of shellfish. The turtles prefer to eat crustaceans and mollusks such as crabs, lobsters, scallops, and conch. However, they are not too picky and will also feed on worms, sea urchins, soft corals, and sea cucumbers. As juveniles, during the pelagic stage in the open ocean, they also feed on snails, shrimp, fish eggs, jellyfish, insects, and most anything else that floats by.

Some of My Neighbors

Green sea turtles, hawksbill sea turtles, swordfish, Caribbean reef sharks, groupers, corals, Monitor lizards

Life Cycle

Sea turtles are long-lived, and don’t begin breeding until relatively late in life. For loggerheads, that can mean 20¬–35 years old. Courtship, which occurs at sea, is brief. Several males may mate with each female. That way, one clutch of eggs can have multiple fathers. When they are ready to lay their eggs—every one to seven years—females will often return to the very same beach where they themselves hatched, or to one nearby. They haul out on the sand at night, dig a hole, and lay tens of eggs at a time, before covering the hole back up again and taking to sea. On average, each clutch contains 110 eggs and a loggerhead can lay up to seven clutches during the nesting season. Her careful choice of a nest site is all the care she will give her offspring. The hatchlings emerge from the eggs after about two months, weighing less than an ounce. They clamber onto the beach during nighttime, and then they must make a mad dash to the water to escape predators and begin their journey across the sea. Loggerheads can live 60 years or more.

Population Status & Threats

Prehistoric-looking creatures with ancestors that lived during the age of the dinosaurs, sea turtles are remarkably resilient creatures. But large-scale commercial fisheries which cause them to get caught in nets, development of their nesting beaches, destruction of their reef habitats, and poaching of their eggs and meat have put their survival skills to the test. Six of the seven sea turtle species are now endangered. 

WCS Conservation Efforts

WCS conservationists work in key sea turtle habitats across the Gulf of Guinea, western Indian Ocean, Caribbean, and Indo-Pacific seas. At the Glover’s Reef Research Station in Belize, WCS works to protect sea turtle nesting populations along the Belize Barrier Reef through research, cooperative management, training, and education. On Nicaragua’s Caribbean coastline, WCS is building a core staff of local scientists, conservation practitioners, and managers for sea turtle conservation. Our conservationists have also been developing alternative sources of income for fisherman who harvest endangered sea turtles. In Panama, WCS works to protect nesting beaches for leatherbacks and hawksbills, a population decimated by the international trade in tortoiseshell.