Georgia: Baby sea turtles struggling to find the ocean 

(CNN) — During the first week of July, the popular travel centre and gas station chain Buc-ee’s opened its largest location in Georgia, just off coastal Interstate 95.

But it’s not the beaver-branded merchandise or the smell of barbecue that’s attracting Georgia’s sea turtles — it’s the harsh glare of towering high-mast lights.

Under normal conditions, the soft glow of moonlight guides newly hatched loggerhead sea turtles from the beaches of Little St. Simons Island to the ocean. But this summer, brighter and taller lights are disrupting that instinct.

Instead of heading toward the sea, the hatchlings are being drawn miles inland, where they risk falling to predators or dying from exhaustion before they find the water, said Scott Coleman, ecological manager of Little St. Simons Island.

The loggerheads are the only sea turtle species to regularly nest on Georgia’s barrier islands, including the Golden Isles.

St. Simons Island, the largest of the isles, has long struggled with hatchlings losing their sense of direction and becoming what’s known as “misoriented,” largely due to the artificial glow from beachfront homes and vacation rentals, according to Catherine Ridley, vice president of education and communication at One Hundred Miles, a nonprofit working to conserve Georgia’s coastal habitats.

The problem has only intensified in recent months.

A previously dark stretch near I-95’s Exit 42 in Brunswick, Georgia, is now flooded with intense, artificial light from the high-mast light fixtures illuminating the Buc-ee’s exit. The lights were there before the proposal and construction of Buc-ee’s, according to Brittany Dozier, Glynn County’s director of communications. Buc-ee’s itself is not responsible for the lights.

The county is choosing to keep them on “for the safety of the motoring public,” Dozier said.

However, the set up casts light far beyond the highway, extending onto beaches even 12 miles away, including Little St. Simons and Sapelo.

“It’s more than sky glow — you can see the light from the actual bulbs shining directly onto the beach,” Ridley said. “When you have unshielded artificial lights shining brightly onto the nesting beach, it can override the natural cues the turtles use to find their way to the ocean, and we see misorientations as the result.”

A brightness crisis

Georgia’s Department of Natural Resources monitors sea turtle nests and misorientations on Little St. Simons Island. In 2024, 11% of nests had more than 10 misoriented hatchlings, according to a report from the department’s Wildlife Resources Division. On average, each loggerhead nest has around 120 hatchlings, Ridley said.

However, it’s not just hatchlings at risk from artificial lighting. Nesting females also avoid brightly lit areas, reducing their options for safe nesting grounds along the coast, according to Coleman.

The turtles typically nest on the same beaches each season from late May to mid-August. Although conservationists monitor nests closely, rescuing misoriented hatchlings is not always an option.

“We never really know exactly when the nests are going to hatch, and in any given nesting season we are monitoring 75+ nests, and often more than 100 nests,” Coleman said in an email. “When hatchlings emerge and crawl in the opposite direction of the ocean, they are much more vulnerable to predators.”

Little St. Simons Island and Sapelo bear the brunt of the problem sitting closest to Exit 42. If these types of high-intensity lights continue to expand, even underdeveloped parts of the isles like Jekyll Island — home to the greatest population of nesting turtles along the coast — could see serious long-term consequences for their turtle populations, Coleman warned.

The rise in artificial light has been impacting threatened species of sea turtles all along the Southeast coast. In North Carolina, light-polluted beaches sometimes cause turtles to return to the sea without laying eggs, the National Park Service says. In Florida, there were more than 10,000 loggerhead turtle misorientation events from 2020 to 2023 alone, and that number only accounts for the turtles tracked by the state’s Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.

Across the country, light pollution continues to soar. Based on measurements from citizen scientists, the average night sky in the US increased in brightness by 9.6% each year from 2011 to 2022, the National Park Service reported, equal to doubling the brightness of the sky every eight years.

Experts urge quick fixes with hatching season underway

The Georgia Department of Transportation owns the high-mast lights, but by agreement, Glynn County is responsible for ensuring the lights are operational, said Dozier, the county’s communications director.

The same high-mast lights exist at three other I-95 interchanges in Glynn County, according to Dozier, and the lights near Exit 42 do not violate any county ordinance.

The county’s public works department said the county and state transportation department discussed turning the high-mast lights off after street lights were installed at roundabouts, according to emails between Glynn County Public Works and a Georgia Department of Natural Resources biologist in May and June, shared with CNN by Ridley.

The standard streetlights have since been installed, Ridley said, but the towering high mast lights remain in use as of late July, except during maintenance. Despite pleas from conservationists to dim or turn off the lights during the loggerhead hatching season, which began on July 15, county officials have not committed to shutting them off, Ridley said.

Dozier told CNN on Wednesday the “lighting installed at the roundabouts or near Buc-ee’s was never meant to replace the high-mast system that serves the interchange.”

The Georgia Department of Transportation is currently evaluating the installation of an alternative lighting system, she said. CNN has also reached out to Buc-ee’s for comment, though they are not responsible for building, operating or maintaining the high-mast lights.

In the meantime, conservationists are pushing for temporary fixes to protect this year’s hatchlings.

“It’s hard to understand why anyone needs lights that blindingly bright to begin with, but in the short-term, we’d be open to even temporary fixes that lower the risk to turtles this season, (such as) adding shields so they point in a downward direction,” Ridley said.

These turtles are also beloved by residents and visitors alike, the nonprofit leader noted.

“I speak to tourists and residents every day on the beach that have moved here or have vacationed here for decades, all in hopes of seeing one (turtle) in person,” Ridley said. “But if we’re going to put sea turtles on billboards and magazine ads, we need to hold up our end of the bargain.”