Sea Turtles

The Life Cycle Of A Sea Turtle
I am learning to inform my audience through an explanation piece




What animal has been around since the dinosaurs? You probably did not know it but it is a sea turtle. Sea turtles are reptiles. They are a miraculous animal. There are seven species of sea turtles but six are critically endangered. Sea turtles have been around for 220 million years. Sea turtles can see an extra colour that humans cannot. They have three main stages in life. The egg stage, the childhood stage and the adulthood stage. The first step is being born. All baby sea turtles start off the same and they start as leathery ping pong ball eggs.

The mother sea turtle comes to the high tide line and looks for a good place to nest. She usually lays her eggs in the same place she did last time. She lays about 50-200 eggs in a pit, and then goes back into the water, not able to see her eggs hatch. It takes approximately six weeks for the eggs to hatch and 20 percent of the eggs will not hatch. Once the sea turtles come out of their eggs they crawl to the surface. They are now baby sea turtles.

The baby sea turtles are about the size of your palm. After they crawl out of their pit they make their desperate dash to the water, but they have a lot of predators awaiting them like racoons, crabs and birds. There is also rubbish and holes that people have dug. 50 percent of the sea turtles make it to the water. With the sea turtles that make it to the water they face more dangers like big fish, sharks, dolphins and birds that will try and grab the sea turtles when they come up to the air to breathe. They will eat jellyfish and fish eggs and then they start to grow. The sea turtles will rest in beds of seaweed. 50 percent of the turtles that make it to the water will perish. The survivors will increase in size. It takes a sea turtle 10 years to grow to the size they will be when they grow up.

From a whole nesting site less than 10 percent remain. When they are adults the baby sea turtles are now 160kgs. The only things that worry the sea turtles now are the big sharks and also the killer whale. If female turtles breed 1000 eggs probably only one turtle will remain with human interference. If we do not do anything we will only have one species of sea turtle left.