Sea Turtle Oversight Protection

Permit # 192 is the first of its kind in Broward county Florida and is designated for the sole purpose to rescue and release disoriented sea turtle hatchlings and to document the disorientation events for local and state law enforcement officials. Our dedicated staff will spend thousands of man hours documenting lighting violations that result in the disorientation and death of nesting sea turtle adults and hatchlings. We work with local municipalities to correct their inappropriate administrative actions if they have failed to enforce federal and state policies to protect the sea turtles from lighting. We file our reports with local code enforcement officials and request case information to ensure that they follow through with statutory enforcement at least to the minimum state and federal standards. Unfortunately, we cannot recover every hatchling and watch every nest. This is why we also work to gain lighting compliance through oversight of municipal administrators. We educate the public by hosting sea turtle nesting habitat awareness and lighting workshops - without lighting compliance enforcement, our program would not be the success that it is. In the years that our program has been active, we have reduced hatchling mortality by saving thousands and thousands of sea turtle hatchlings from certain death and educated thousands of people and local municipal administrators.