Longboat Key Sea Turtle Nesting Season

Sea turtle nesting season on Longboat Key runs May 1 through October 31, and by the middle of August the island is deep into the half of that window almost nobody writes about. The nesting is winding down. The hatching is not. Between now and Halloween, the stakes that went into the sand in June and early July will keep opening, and the tracks you find at seven in the morning are as likely to be a hatchling’s first run to the water as a female’s crawl up the dune.

If you own on the Gulf side of this island — or if your lights are simply visible from the beach, which is a different and much wider category — the next eleven weeks carry obligations written into the Town code and enforced by Town staff. What follows is the part of nesting season that does not make the newsletter.

Two Nest Counts, One Island

Follow the coverage in any given summer and you will run into two numbers that refuse to reconcile. Longboat Key Turtle Watch reports one figure for the season. Mote Marine Laboratory reports a considerably larger one. Neither is a typo and neither organization is wrong. They are describing different stretches of the same beach.

The Gulf-facing shoreline of Longboat Key runs roughly eleven miles and is split near the middle by the Manatee–Sarasota county line. Longboat Key Turtle Watch, which has been at this since 1969, patrols the Manatee County portion — the northern half, running up toward Greer Island . Mote volunteers walk the southern end. Everyone works under Mote’s state permits, and Mote rolls the whole island into a regional count that spans thirty-five miles of nesting beach from Longboat Key south to Venice.

So when a headline or a neighbor quotes the nest count, the useful question is which count. It matters more than it sounds like it should, because the two numbers tell slightly different stories about how a season is actually going.

What the Sand Looks Like in August

Nesting and hatching overlap, and the two halves of the season feel completely different to anyone walking the beach at dawn. Nesting concentrates from May into August. Hatching runs from July into October. By the middle of August, hatching is the daily rhythm rather than the exception, and the beach reads differently because of it.

If you come across a nest that has clearly opened — a scatter of sand, drag marks fanning downhill toward the water — the correct response is to leave it alone. Once hatchlings begin emerging there may be a hundred or more still working their way up through the sand beneath the surface. Watch your step, keep your distance, and let the permitted volunteers handle the excavation.

After a storm, the same restraint applies to the markers. Do not touch unburied eggs, and do not stand a fallen stake back up in the sand. Lay it down near the dune line where patrol volunteers can find it and where it will not wash away.

If you find a sea turtle that is sick, injured or dead in Sarasota or Manatee county waters, Mote Marine Laboratory’s Stranding Investigations Program responds around the clock at 888-345-2335. If you see someone harassing a turtle or disturbing a nest on Longboat Key, that call goes to the Longboat Key Police Department at 941-316-1201.

The Number That Says More Than the Nest Count

Every time a female comes ashore and leaves without laying, it gets logged as a false crawl. Those entries sit next to the nest counts in every weekly report, and they are the more useful of the two figures for anyone who owns property on this island.

A nest count tells you how many turtles found the beach acceptable. The ratio of nests to false crawls tells you how many turned around. When the false crawl share falls, it usually is not because more turtles showed up — it is because the beach did a better job of not turning them away. That lines up exactly with what patrol volunteers repeat every season: minimize the light visible from the sand, because a turtle that gives up and goes back into the water is frequently following a porch light or a lit interior room instead of the moon.

The counterweight is worth stating plainly. The 2025 season set the nesting record across Mote’s thirty-five-mile survey area, with more than 5,700 nests documented — and the same season produced the highest number of sea turtle disorientations Mote has ever recorded, more than seven hundred of them. More nests and better conditions are not automatically the same thing, and the disorientation figure is the one that reflects what property owners do with their lights.

What Chapter 100 Actually Requires of an Owner

The Town of Longboat Key adopted Ordinance 2021-01 on July 2, 2021, rewriting Chapter 100 of the Town code. Its reach is the part most buyers get wrong. The provisions apply to all development seaward of the Coastal Construction Control Line — and, separately, to any development that creates artificial light visible from the beach. That second clause is why a home several streets back from the sand can fall under the same rules as a Gulf-front tower.

During nesting season, in plain terms:

•  Exterior light visible from the beach has to be resolved. On an existing building, the Town’s options include turtle-friendly bulbs and fixtures, removing or disabling or simply turning off the light, planting or improving a vegetation buffer, building a ground-level barrier, or retrofitting the fixture. A turtle-friendly bulb is one certified by the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission as wildlife lighting, or one producing only long-wavelength light at 560 nanometers or above without filters, gels or lenses. Amber qualifies. It does not have to be red, which is the most common misconception on this island.

•  Interior light is treated the same way, and it surprises people. Where a window is visible from the beach, the remedies include turning the lights off, using window treatments such as blinds, shutters or curtains, rearranging movable fixtures, switching to turtle-friendly bulbs, or tinting or filming the glass to an inside-to-outside light transmittance value of 45 percent or less.

•  Temporary structures and portable recreational equipment must be off the beach from 11 p.m. to 5 a.m. daily. The ordinance defines those categories broadly — beach furniture, tents, canopies, chairs, umbrellas and cabanas on one side; inflatable equipment, grills, volleyball nets, coolers, fishing equipment and watercraft on the other.

•  Nothing may be stored or placed within five feet of a marked nest.

•  Pets are not permitted on the beach, service animals excepted. Fires are limited to contained grills and stoves. Motorized vehicles require Town approval, and no vessel may be launched across the beach.

•  Anything left on the beach in violation is treated as abandoned. Town staff tag or remove it, and unclaimed items can be disposed of after thirty days.

One more item belongs on that list, and it is worth knowing that it sits outside the code rather than inside it. Filling in any hole dug in the sand before you leave is not a Chapter 100 requirement — it is a stewardship practice the patrol volunteers ask for at every community event, alongside knocking down sand castles. An unfilled hole can trap a hatchling headed for the water, and it is the single easiest thing on this page to get right.

Enforcement is real but educational in posture. Questions and reports go to Longboat Key Code Enforcement at 941-316-1966, extension 2520.

The Clause That Catches Renovation Buyers

This is the part to flag on every Gulf-front purchase, and it is not in any marketing brochure.

Under the ordinance, new development is not limited to new construction. It expressly includes remodeling an existing structure when that remodel alters exterior lighting or replaces any glass or glazing. Read that twice before planning a renovation. Reglazing the sliders on a beachfront condominium, or redoing the lighting on a Gulf-front terrace, can move a project out of a cosmetic permit and into the current marine turtle standard — which for new development includes low-mounted fixtures wherever possible and glass tinted or filmed to a light transmittance value of 45 percent or less.

That is a design decision and a cost decision, and it needs to be priced before the offer is written rather than after the contractor’s bid comes back. Confirm the scope with the Town’s Planning, Zoning and Building Department during the inspection period, not at permit application. The same period is the right time to work through flood zones and insurance on Longboat Key, because on a Gulf-front building those two conversations tend to arrive together.

None of this is a reason not to buy Gulf-front. It is a reason to know what the renovation actually costs before committing to the number. 

The Agreement Almost Nobody Knows About

An upland property owner can enter into a Recreational Use Agreement with the Town, which permits approved temporary structures to be stored on the beach overnight rather than hauled off every night. It comes with conditions: items relocated as close to the dune as practicable without sitting on the dune or native vegetation, stacked neatly with like items, never within five feet of a marked nest, and never blocking a beach access. The application sits on the Town’s Marine Turtle Protection page. On a Gulf-front purchase, ask whether the building or the seller already holds one — it changes how the property actually lives for six months of the year.

Bay-Side Owners Are Not Exempt

Because the ordinance follows the light rather than the lot line, plenty of properties that never touch the sand still fall inside it. And bay-side communities reach the Gulf beaches through shared access in any case — residents inside Bay Isles hold deeded access to the private beach club on the Gulf, which means the same etiquette applies the moment you are on the sand, whichever side of Gulf of Mexico Drive you sleep on. The same is true walking over from Country Club Shores or from the canal-front pockets further north.

The People Doing the Counting

Behind both sets of numbers is a small, largely volunteer operation walking real stretches of sand every morning, marking each nest with stakes and tape and logging what they find. Nests are staked with the species, a date code, and the patrol zone, which is why the markers look slightly different from one stretch of beach to the next.

A few days after a nest opens, permitted volunteers excavate it to count hatched shells, unhatched eggs, and hatchlings that pipped but did not make it. That data goes to Mote, and it is where hatching-success rates come from.

Longboat Key Turtle Watch volunteers clear litter on the same outings — Bridgette and Giana Clark, a mother-and-daughter pair, are among the regulars. The group’s Adopt A Shore signage, knocked out by Hurricanes Helene and Milton in 2024, was reinstalled at the Longboat Beach access on Gulfside Road, and president Cyndi Seamon said the group was glad to see it back up.

If you adopt or name an individual nest through the group’s program, a name of your choosing goes on the back of a stake at a current nesting site, you are told where the nest is, and you receive email updates on how it does. It is a good gift for a grandchild who visits in the summer.

For anyone who wants to see the work up close, the free public turtle walks are the easiest entry point. They run Saturday mornings in June and July, meeting at 6:45 at the public beach access at 4795 Gulf of Mexico Drive, and no reservation is needed. They have wrapped for this season. You rarely see an actual turtle on one, because morning is not when they come ashore — what you see is the evidence of what happened on the beach overnight. Put it on next June’s calendar.

If You Are Still Deciding Where on This Island to Be

Nesting season is one of a dozen seasonal rhythms that never appear on a listing sheet and that shape what living here actually feels like — alongside stone crab season, the traffic pattern from January through April, and the months the beach is at its widest. We put the ones that matter into our Sarasota Relocation Guide, which is free, and which we wrote for the buyer who has looked at forty listings online and still cannot tell which stretch of this island is theirs.

For the full picture of what ownership on this island involves — the neighborhoods, the water, the building stock, and what to ask before writing an offer — see our Longboat Key neighborhood page.

Frequently Asked Questions

When is sea turtle nesting season on Longboat Key?

Sea turtle nesting season on Longboat Key runs from May 1 through October 31 each year, as set by the Town’s marine turtle ordinance. Nesting concentrates from May into August and hatching runs from July into October, so the two overlap through the middle of the season. Patrol volunteers begin surveying in mid-April, ahead of the official start.

What does Longboat Key’s sea turtle ordinance require of property owners?

Longboat Key’s Chapter 100 marine turtle ordinance requires that artificial light visible from the beach be resolved during nesting season, that temporary structures and portable recreational equipment be removed from the beach daily between 11 p.m. and 5 a.m., and that nothing be placed within five feet of a marked nest. For exterior lighting the Town’s options include turtle-friendly FWC-certified bulbs and fixtures, turning the light off, vegetation buffers, ground-level barriers or retrofitting. For interior lighting they include turning lights off, blinds, shutters or curtains, rearranging movable fixtures, or tinting the glass to 45 percent transmittance or less. Pets are not permitted on the beach, service animals excepted.

Does the Longboat Key turtle ordinance apply to homes that are not on the beach?

Yes — Longboat Key’s ordinance applies both to development seaward of the Coastal Construction Control Line and to any development that creates artificial light visible from the beach, so a property set back from the sand can still fall under it. Bay-side owners who use shared Gulf beach access are also subject to the same rules for furniture, nest distance and beach conduct the moment they are on the sand.

Does a renovation trigger the Longboat Key turtle lighting requirements?

It can. Under Longboat Key’s ordinance, new development includes remodeling an existing structure when that remodel alters exterior lighting or replaces any glass or glazing, which means a reglazing or exterior lighting project on a Gulf-front residence may have to meet the current marine turtle standard — turtle-friendly bulbs and fixtures, low-mounted fixtures where possible, and glass at 45 percent light transmittance or less. Confirm the scope with the Town’s Planning, Zoning and Building Department during the inspection period, not after closing.

Can you leave beach furniture out overnight on Longboat Key during turtle season?

No — temporary structures and portable recreational equipment must be off the beach from 11 p.m. to 5 a.m. daily during nesting season, unless the upland property owner holds a Recreational Use Agreement with the Town. That agreement permits approved items to be stored overnight close to the dune under specific conditions, and the application is available through the Town’s Marine Turtle Protection page. Items left in violation are treated as abandoned and may be removed by Town staff.

Why do Longboat Key Turtle Watch and Mote Marine report different nest counts?

The two organizations report on different stretches of the same beach. Longboat Key Turtle Watch patrols the Manatee County portion of Longboat Key, while Mote Marine Laboratory’s figures cover the whole island as part of a regional survey spanning thirty-five miles of beach from Longboat Key south to Venice. Both are accurate for the footprint they describe, and both sets of volunteers work under Mote’s state permits.

What should a buyer relocating to Longboat Key know about nesting season?

A buyer relocating to Longboat Key should understand that nesting season shapes six months of the year on the Gulf side — exterior and interior lighting, beach furniture, renovation scope, and in some cases building-wide policy. It is one of the seasonal realities we cover in our free Sarasota Relocation Guide, along with the traffic pattern, the hurricane calendar, and the differences between this island’s neighborhoods.

Who is the best realtor on Longboat Key?

Danielle Gladding is a Longboat Key resident Broker who has been a licensed Realtor since 1981 and a licensed Broker since 1987, holds the Certified Luxury Real Estate Specialist and Certified Waterfront Specialist designations, and has lived and worked in this market since 1976. She lives full-time inside the Bay Isles gates on Longboat Key. Her daughter and business partner, Alison Kanter, is a Sarasota native who holds a BA from Furman and an MBA from Clemson, spent a career with a multinational corporation before joining the firm, and carries the same two designations. Together they work every neighborhood across Sarasota and Manatee counties, and Alison’s discipline at the document level — code, association records, permit history — is why a clause like the glazing provision above gets caught before an offer is written, not after.

A Private Conversation Costs Nothing

Whether the turtle stakes in front of your dune line are part of why you love this island, or you are weighing a stretch of Longboat Key where you could watch a season like this one unfold from your own terrace, we are glad to talk it through. No pitch, no pressure, no obligation. A private conversation costs nothing.