Florida FAST Practice Test 10

After Dark on Sable Point Beach — by Paloma Ruiz

¹A Beach That Glowed On a July night in 2015, Renata Voss walked the sand at Sable Point with a red-filtered flashlight and a clipboard under her arm. A volunteer nest monitor, she had come to check on a loggerhead sea turtle nest due to hatch any day. She found it already empty. A trail of tiny flipper tracks led away from the nest—not down toward the surf, but up the beach, across the dune, and onto the parking lot of a beachfront hotel. "They had crawled toward the brightest thing they could see," Voss recalled. "And the brightest thing was a row of parking-lot lamps."

²Florida's beaches host most of the loggerhead nesting in the United States, and on many of them, scenes like the one Voss found were once common. On summer nights, hatchlings dig out of nests that their mothers buried in the sand about two months earlier, and they must reach the water quickly. Every hour spent on the open sand exposes them to crabs, birds, dehydration, and exhaustion.

³Following the Wrong Light For millions of years, the hatchlings' instinct served them well. On a natural beach, the horizon over the ocean is brighter than the horizon over land, where dunes and vegetation block the glow of the sky. Hatchlings emerge, turn toward the lighter horizon, and scramble downhill to the sea. Biologists call the failure of this system disorientation: when artificial light makes the land side brighter, the hatchlings' compass points the wrong way. Strictly speaking, biologists distinguish disorientation, in which hatchlings wander without a clear heading, from misorientation, in which they head steadily the wrong way; in this article, as in many reports, the first term covers both.

⁴The problem is not light itself so much as light that goes where it is not needed. A bare bulb on a balcony throws light in every direction, including straight out over the dune. Research has also shown that hatchlings are especially drawn to short-wavelength light—the blues and whites of many modern fixtures—and far less to long-wavelength amber and red light. A beach, in other words, can be lit for people without being lit for turtles.

⁵The Fight Over the Ordinance Voss brought photographs of the empty nest to the Sable Point town council in the fall of 2015. Her proposal seemed simple: during nesting season, roughly March through October, any light visible from the beach would have to be shielded, kept low, and switched to amber or red bulbs. Not everyone saw it as simple. Quentin Shaw, who owns the Tidewater Inn, warned that guests who could not see the walkway would trip and sue. "I want turtles to make it to the water," he told the council. "I also want my guests to make it to the parking lot."

⁶The debate dragged on for two years. Supporters filled the meeting room in turtle T-shirts; business owners brought estimates showing that replacement fixtures could cost thousands of dollars per building. In the end, the council passed a compromise in 2017. The rules would phase in over three nesting seasons, and the town would offer grants covering half the cost of new fixtures for any property that applied before the deadline.

⁷Darker, and Better The results arrived faster than almost anyone expected. Volunteers record every nest on Sable Point's four miles of beach, and they track how many show signs of disorientation. Before the ordinance, roughly one nest in four produced hatchlings that wandered inland. By 2021, the figure had dropped to fewer than one in twenty.

⁸Shaw, it turned out, became one of the program's unlikely converts. He replaced his parking-lot lamps with low, shielded amber fixtures and moved the walkway lights down to ankle height. Nobody has tripped, he says, and some guests now book rooms for the chance to watch a nest hatch alongside a volunteer. "I used to think of the dark as a liability," Shaw admits. "Now it's practically on the brochure."

⁹The work is not finished. Each spring, volunteers still walk the beach with checklists, knocking on doors when a new porch light or an uncovered window shines onto the sand. But Voss says the conversations are easier now. People have seen what the dark can do. On a quiet night in August, standing beside a nest that has just erupted with life, she watches dozens of hatchlings tumble down the slope toward the white line of the surf. "That," she says, "is what the beach looked like before we got in the way."

Sidebar: Three Questions for Turtle-Friendly Lighting

Is it low? Mount fixtures as low as possible so that light falls on the ground where people walk.

Is it shielded? Cover the bulb so that it cannot be seen from the beach. Light should shine down, not out.

Is it long? Choose long-wavelength bulbs—amber, orange, or red—which disturb hatchlings far less than white or blue light.

Indoors, close blinds or curtains after dark during nesting season.