Coyotes ate well last summer after digging deep into the beach on Sanibel Island when sea turtle hatchlings were still developing in their shells.
This year, researchers at the Sanibel-Captiva Conservation Foundation have been trying to frustrate the animals into losing interest in sea turtle nests on Bowman’s Beach by using decoys with no reward buried in the sand underneath.
As things are turning out it is the researchers who are getting frustrated.
“We're exhausting every FWC-approved method,” Kelly Sloan, the foundation's coastal wildlife director, said. “We're trying new things that haven't been tried before to try and reduce that depredation rate.” Depredation is a polite way to say a nest was ransacked by a coyote to get to the developing sea turtle eggs, which are filled with concentrated fats, acids, protein and vitamins A and E.
As of mid-August, Sanibel and Captiva islands’ depredation rate has risen to as high as 42% of nests - more than four times the goal of loggerhead recovery plans.
According to 2025 state data, the beaches at each end of Sanibel Island and on Captiva Island are in the top dozen of 235 Florida beaches monitored for nest predation. It’s getting so the Sanibel City Council recently voted to help cover the cost of a coyote population study — comparable studies range from $131,000 to $169,000.
The researchers are putting up familiar visual clues at Bowman’s Beach that a sea turtle nest is below – four wooden stakes with brightly colored warning tape strung between. In the middle, a metal grate lays on the sand as barrier to an easy dig.
“We picked this section because last year It had the highest depredation rate of all of the places between Sanibel and Captiva,” said Lilly Hepworth, part of the foundation’s sea turtle team. “Our goal with this was to oversaturate the beach with nests and hopefully they would be digging into the decoys just about as much as the real nests and their return of investment would be less.”
It was working — until it wasn’t.
“There was definitely more interaction with the decoys in the beginning,” she said. “It's kind of started to slow down and they've just been getting the real nests and not messing so much with the decoys.”
Hepworth said the hope was that the coyotes would give up because they would dig and dig where there were nest markers for no payoff. Nobody is sure how they got onto the islands, but a leading theory is they could have walked over the causeway at night.
But it appears the animals figured out what was going on and moved back to the ones where their ultra-sensitive noses told them there may be something down below.
“Perhaps. Perhaps,” Hepworth said. “We don't know. It's hard to say.”
Environmental reporting for WGCU is funded in part by VoLo Foundation, a non-profit with a mission to accelerate change and global impact by supporting science-based climate solutions, enhancing education, and improving health.
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