Florida sets record for sea turtle nests but Trump move could stall recovery

Loggerhead turtles abound this season but rollback of Endangered Species Act protections could threaten future Wildlife groups in Florida are celebrating record numbers of sea turtle nests this season, but experts warn Donald Trump’s recent gutting of the Endangered Species Act (ESA) could reverse decades of their recovery from the edge of extinction. With more than two months of the summer nesting season still to run, loggerhead turtles have already made 13,770 nests, hundreds more than recorded in any previous year, along an 8.5-mile stretch of shoreline monitored by the Loggerhead Marinelife Center in Juno Beach, on Florida’s Atlantic coast. The same record has fallen on Sanibel island, on the Gulf coast, where loggerheads have laid 922 nests so far this year, surpassing the 2023 total of 878, according to the Sanibel-Captiva Conservation Foundation. The numbers reflect the ongoing revival of sea turtles since the 1970s, when overhunting, poaching and habitat loss pushed several species to the brink, including the loss of about 95% of the Caribbean’s population of green turtles. The ESA, passed in 1973, enshrined protections that are paying dividends now because sea turtle hatch