Sea turtles on Brevard's beaches: what the state's nest counts show

Cocoa Beach sits on one of the busiest sea turtle nesting coasts in the country. The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission’s Statewide Nesting Beach Survey counts nests county by county, and in the 2025 season it recorded, on 115.2 kilometers of Brevard County beach:

Species	Brevard nests, 2025	Florida nests, 2025	Brevard’s share
Loggerhead (Caretta caretta)	22,716	100,951	about 22%
Green turtle (Chelonia mydas)	30,431	66,476	about 46%
Leatherback (Dermochelys coriacea)	129	2,012	about 6%

Brevard’s beaches held almost half of every green turtle nest the survey found in Florida that year. The counts cover the whole county’s surveyed shoreline, not Cocoa Beach alone.

Why Florida matters

The FWC puts the numbers in context. The southeastern United States, it says, hosts the world’s largest nesting aggregation of the loggerhead. Florida’s green turtle nesting aggregation is the second largest in the Western Atlantic, and Florida is the only state in the continental United States where leatherbacks regularly nest.

The refuge to the south

The densest nesting on this coast is south of Cocoa Beach. The Archie Carr National Wildlife Refuge, established in 1991, covers 20.5 miles of beach and shoreline between Melbourne Beach and Wabasso Beach, in Brevard and Indian River counties. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service calls it the most significant loggerhead nesting area in the world and the most significant green turtle nesting area in North America: 20 to 35 percent of all loggerhead and green turtle nests in the country, and 15,000 to 30,000 nests a year. The refuge itself is only 258 acres, set among developed lots, and a partnership of federal, state and county governments and private groups, the Archie Carr Working Group, has protected more than 2,600 acres of dune around it.

It’s named for Archie Carr Jr., a University of Florida zoologist who earned the university’s first doctorate in zoology in 1937, spent more than fifty years there, and wrote 11 books and more than 120 scientific articles on sea turtles. The service credits his writing with bringing the first international attention to their decline. He died in 1987.

How the count works

The survey counts two things. A nest is recorded when a turtle comes ashore and lays eggs. A “non-nesting emergence” is recorded when a turtle comes ashore, leaving tracks, and returns to the sea without laying. In 2025 Brevard’s beaches logged 34,447 loggerhead and 65,337 green turtle non-nesting emergences alongside the nests. The FWC’s Fish and Wildlife Research Institute coordinates the statewide survey and a separate Index Nesting Beach Survey, which counts a standard set of beaches every year so that trends can be compared over time.

Lights out

For anyone living on the beach, the FWC’s main ask is darkness. The FWC’s rules for beachfront lighting come down to three: keep fixtures low and the bulb as dim as the job allows; use only long-wavelength light, 560 nanometers or longer, which means amber, orange or red; and shield every fixture so it points down and can’t be seen from the beach. Decorative lights, string lights and uplights should stay off until nesting season ends on October 31. Indoor light counts too: the FWC says interior lights are often brighter than the outdoor ones, and recommends closing blinds at night and tinting beach-facing glass to let 45 percent of the light through or less.

Further Reading

• Florida’s Fabulous Natural Places by Tim Ohr