Please Help Our Sea Turtles

We are the Island Turtle Team for the Isle of Palms and Sullivan’s Island in South Carolina, a volunteer group who have a permit from SC Department of Natural Resources to help with sea turtle nesting. We love our loggerhead sea turtles who come here every summer. For over a dozen years we have been collecting genetics samples from one eggshell from each loggerhead nest laid on our beaches as part of a multi-state genetics research project that identifies each and every turtle mom.

We are trying to help Dr. Brian Shamblin who has been collecting DNA samples from thousands of sea turtle nests in NC, SC and GA. He is affiliated with the University of Georgia Warnell school of Forestry and Natural Resources. We know Brian well and know that his hard work has an incredible value in learning about each individual mother turtle and advancing sea turtle conservation in general. Just recently, he discovered that one of our Isle of Palms turtle mother has six daughters, all with the same father. The mother has been nesting for decades, and the recently grown daughters nesting since 2018. She always returns to the north end of the Isle of Palms to lay eggs.

Sadly, this amazing project has lost its federal funding and will not be able to continue without financial help. We are trying to raise funds to keep this exciting and innovative research going. It is groundbreaking and important research.

Since this project encompasses three states plus part of Florida, it involves thousands of nests with an estimated $20 per sample. There is great time and effort involved with collecting, picking up, processing, and paying people to analyze the DNA. It can cost as much as $100,000 a season. We are trying to be a part of meeting this goal and hoping for your help.

If you cannot donate at this time, please share this information with friends and

other contacts so that we might be able help this project continue. Thank you so much.

Please check out the presentation attached from Dr. Brian Shamblin. It's a long presentation but if you watch minutes 38 through 42 and minutes 42 through 46, you will see the nesting female information that this program has collected.

Link to the Shamblin Lab

We also have a video of a female loggerhead sea turtle returning to the ocea and a nest hatching on Isle of Palms!