The lifespan of sea turtles has been speculated at 80 years. It takes decades for sea turtles to reach sexual maturity. After mating at sea, adult female sea turtles return to land to nest at night. Different species of sea turtles exhibit various levels of philopatry. In the extreme case, females return to the beach where they hatched. This can take place every two to four years in maturity. They make from one to eight nests pe
r season.
The mature nesting female hauls herself onto the beach and finds suitable sand on which to create a nest. Using her hind flippers, she digs a circular hole 40 to 50 centimetres (16 to 20 in) deep. After the hole is dug, the female then starts filling the nest with a clutch of soft-shelled eggs one by one until she has deposited around 50 to 200 eggs, depending on the species. Some species have been reported to lay 250 eggs, such as the hawksbill. After laying, she re-fills the nest with sand, re-sculpting and smoothing the surface until it is relatively undetectable visually. The whole process takes thirty to sixty minutes. She then returns to the ocean, leaving the eggs untended.
The hatchling's gender depends on the sand temperature. Lighter sands maintain higher temperatures, which decreases incubation time and results in more female hatchlings.
Incubation takes about two months. The eggs in one nest hatch together over a very short period of time. When ready, hatchlings tear their shells apart with their snout and dig through the sand. Once they reach the surface, they instinctively head towards the sea. Only a very small proportion of each hatch (usually .01%) succeed, because local opportunist predators, such as the common seagull, gorge on the new turtles.
The survivors then proceed into the open ocean. In 1987, Carr discovered that the young of Chelonia mydas and Caretta caretta spent a great deal of their pelagic lives in floating sargassum beds, where there are thick mats of unanchored seaweed. Within these beds, they found ample shelter and food. In the absence of sargassum beds, turtle young feed in the vicinity of upwelling "fronts".[2] In 2007, Reich determined that green turtle hatchlings spend the first three to five years of their lives in pelagic waters. In the open ocean, pre-juveniles of this particular species were found to feed on zooplankton and smaller nekton before they are recruited into inshore seagrass meadows as obligate herbivores.[3][4]
Instead of nesting individually like the other species, Ridley turtles come ashore en masse, known as an "arribada" (arrival). With the Kemp's Ridley, this occurs during the day.
Salt gland
Sea turtles possess a salt excretory gland at the corner of the eye, in the nostrils, or in the tongue, depending on the species; chelonian salt glands are found in the corner of the eyes in leatherback turtles. Due to the iso-osmotic makeup of jellyfish and the other gelatinous prey upon which s
ea turtles subsist, sea turtle diets are high in salt; chelonian salt gland excretions are almost entirely composed of sodium chloride 1500-1800 mosmoll-1 (Marshall and Cooper, 1988; Nicolson and Lutz, 1989; Reina and Cooper, 2000).
