Meeting Abstract
All sea turtle populations present in U.S. waters are considered to be either threatened or endangered and are protected by the Endangered Species Act. Sex ratio monitoring is vital to conservation research because sea turtles exhibit temperature-dependent sex determination, which means that the nest environmental temperature influences the sex ratio produced; warmer temperatures produce more female hatchlings while cooler temperatures produce more males. Variability in the environment caused by increasing global temperatures, increasing severity of storms, and anthropogenic changes such as beach renourishment may thus alter sex ratios, limiting future reproductive potential and hindering conservation efforts. Monitoring sex ratios allows us to minimize negative influences on reproductive potential. This research focuses on one aspect of conservation, a sex identification technique for hatchling sea turtles to monitor male: female sex ratios produced during incubation in the nest. As hatchlings do not exhibit external secondary sex characteristics, however, sex identification at the hatchling stage is difficult. As a result, several methods of sex identification in sea turtle hatchlings have been developed, though each has limitations such that a reproducible, less-invasive method would advance studies of sex identification. This study used High Performance Liquid Chromatography (HPLC) to separate and identify plasma steroid hormones (estriol, estrone, estradiol, progesterone, and testosterone) in a South Florida population of loggerhead Caretta caretta, and green sea turtle Chelonia mydas, hatchlings. Gender was ground-truthed by laparoscopy.
