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Sea Turtles Are Back. But There’s a Catch.

Climate change has done a number on the sex ratio.

A sea turtle.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Florida’s green sea turtles are making a comeback — sort of.

They had their best-ever nesting season in 2023, with 74,300 nests — a 40% increase over the previous record, set in 2017, The New York Times reports. But this welcome news comes with an unsettling catch: The percentage of male turtle hatchlings has dropped precipitously. In recent seasons, according to the Times, “Between 87 and 100 percent of the hatchlings” tested by Dr. Jeanette Wyneken, a professor at Florida Atlantic University, were female.

Climate change is a likely contributor to the imbalance, as a green sea turtle’s sex is determined by the temperature of the sand in which its egg develops. Warmer sand results in more females; cooler sand, more males. In the short term, this might benefit the turtles, with more females able to produce more eggs once they reach maturity (providing “there’s enough boys to service the girls,” as Dr. Wyneken put it). But another side effect of the changing climate is that extreme heat dries out the turtles’ nests — killing the baby turtles before they’ve had a chance to hatch.

As with so much else in the natural world, such news is a case of two steps forward, one step back (or, perhaps, one flipper-crawl back). Thanks in part to decades of conservation efforts, 2023 has also seen record green sea turtle nest counts in Texas and Alabama — and while such milestones are a cause to celebrate, climate change’s effects on the resulting offspring are a reminder that there is always more work to do.

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Sparks

Trump Says He’s Going to Slap a Huge Tariff on Copper

“I believe the tariff on copper — we’re going to make it 50%.”

Donald Trump.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

President Trump announced Tuesday during a cabinet meeting that he plans to impose a hefty tax on U.S. copper imports.

“I believe the tariff on copper — we’re going to make it 50%,” he told reporters.

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Trump Will ‘Deal’ with Wind and Solar Tax Credits in Megabill, GOP Congressman Says

“We had enough assurance that the president was going to deal with them.”

Donald Trump.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

A member of the House Freedom Caucus said Wednesday that he voted to advance President Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” after receiving assurances that Trump would “deal” with the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean energy tax credits – raising the specter that Trump could try to go further than the megabill to stop usage of the credits.

Representative Ralph Norman, a Republican of North Carolina, said that while IRA tax credits were once a sticking point for him, after meeting with Trump “we had enough assurance that the president was going to deal with them in his own way,” he told Eric Garcia, the Washington bureau chief of The Independent. Norman specifically cited tax credits for wind and solar energy projects, which the Senate version would phase out more slowly than House Republicans had wanted.

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Majority of North Carolina Voters Want to Keep the IRA, Poll Finds

The state’s senior senator, Thom Tillis, has been vocal about the need to maintain clean energy tax credits.

A North Carolina sign and solar panels.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

The majority of voters in North Carolina want Congress to leave the Inflation Reduction Act well enough alone, a new poll from Data for Progress finds.

The survey, which asked North Carolina voters specifically about the clean energy and climate provisions in the bill, presented respondents with a choice between two statements: “The IRA should be repealed by Congress” and “The IRA should be kept in place by Congress.” (“Don’t know” was also an option.)

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