Sea turtle season along the upper Texas coast begins quietly each spring, but this year it ended with something extraordinary. By the time the 2026 nesting season drew to a close in July, Texas beaches had recorded 689 Kemp’s ridley nests, the highest total ever documented in the state’s history. 

 It was a season that stretched from Galveston Island to Boca Chica Beach, with volunteers, students, and researchers patrolling the shoreline at dawn, scanning for signs almost invisible to the untrained eye - a faint crawl mark, the sweep of flippers, the subtle depression of a hidden nest. 

 Some mornings brought nothing. Other mornings revealed proof that an endangered sea turtle had emerged from the Gulf during the night and trusted a Texas beach with the future of her species. 

 For the teams with the Gulf Center for Sea Turtle Research at Texas A&M University at Galveston, those tracks represent far more than data points. They represent survival - and this year, they told a record-breaking story. 

 Leading much of that work is Dr. Christopher Marshall, Regents Professor of Marine Biology at Texas A&M University at Galveston and founder of the Gulf Center for Sea Turtle Research. His experience with sea turtles stretches back more than 30 years and across several continents. 

 Marshall’s journey into sea turtle conservation began in southeast Florida in the early 1990s while he was earning his master’s degree in marine biology. 

 

 “I got a job as a sea turtle patroller,” Marshall said. “We would survey nesting beaches from Fort Lauderdale north to Pompano Beach.” 

 At dawn, he and other researchers scoured beaches counting crawls, identifying nests, and relocating eggs to protected sites where hatchlings stood a better chance of surviving predators and development pressures. 

 “There it was loggerheads, green sea turtles, and leatherbacks,” he said. “We would move the nests to either caged corrals or private dark beaches.” 

 What began as field work soon evolved into a lifelong scientific pursuit. Marshall’s background differs from many marine biologists because his early research centered not on sea turtles, but on marine mammals, anatomy, biomechanics, and functional morphology - essentially the engineering behind how animals physically work. 

 “One of the things I do is look at how the animal works from the engineering perspective,” Marshall said, adding that work with loggerheads proved especially fascinating. 

 Loggerheads are durophagous animals, meaning they specialize in crushing hard prey such as crabs, mollusks, and shellfish. Despite their reputation for powerful jaws, no one had measured the bite force of a loggerhead sea turtle before Marshall’s research. 

 “Basically, an adult loggerhead can generate well over 500 pounds of bite force,” he said. “Oceanic juveniles don’t return to the coast until their jaws are strong enough to start crushing their prey.” 

 Marshall and his team eventually published groundbreaking research on the subject, work that later carried him across the globe studying sea turtles in Mexico, Japan, and Qatar. 

 “That bite force work took me to Mexico, took me to Japan,” Marshall said. “I also had a separate project over in the Middle East in the country of Qatar attaching satellite tags on hawksbill and green sea turtles.” 

 Over the years, Marshall conducted nesting surveys, satellite tagging, health assessments, feeding studies, and conservation programs in some of the world’s most important sea turtle habitats. “The sea turtles just keep coming to me.” 

 But even after decades of international work, Marshall believed Texas lacked something essential. 

 “In 2019, I created the Gulf Center for Sea Turtle Research because I felt that Texas just didn’t have the research infrastructure and plan to create a long-term, healthy scientific sea turtle program like I saw in Florida and elsewhere,” he said. 

 

 Today, the center’s work spans rescue operations, rehabilitation, nesting patrols, necropsies, education, conservation outreach, and research partnerships throughout the Gulf Coast and beyond. Among its oldest and most visible efforts is the Sea Aggie Sea Turtle Patrol monitoring program. 

 “This year we had 400-plus citizen volunteers patrolling the coast,” Marshall said. “We cover from the Texas-Louisiana border, and we’ve asked to expand all the way down to the Colorado River and East Matagorda Bay.” 

 Those volunteers help locate and excavate nests for transport to one of the State of Texas’ incubation or corral systems farther south during the official sea turtle season, which Marshall said runs annually from April 1 through July 15. 

 Sea turtle nesting itself remains one of nature’s most astonishing survival strategies. In a healthy Kemp’s ridley population, female turtles emerge in synchronized nesting events, laying hundreds of eggs that incubate for roughly 50 to 60 days before hatching together in overwhelming numbers. 

 “One of the ways sea turtles survived is to overwhelm the predators,” Marshall said. “All the hatchlings hatch at once and come out at once. Sometimes it’s like a feeding frenzy for birds, crabs, and fish, but they overwhelm the number of predators, and a good percentage survive.” 

 The goal is to re-establish that behavior in Kemp’s ridley sea turtles, the most critically endangered sea turtle in the world. But survival has become increasingly difficult in modern oceans. 

 At the Gulf Center’s rehabilitation facility on Pelican Island, staff and volunteers routinely care for turtles suffering from boat strikes, fishing-line entanglements, disease, cold stunning, and plastic ingestion. 

 Marshall said the center also performs necropsies - animal autopsies - on deceased turtles, a specialized skill that helps researchers better understand the environmental threats facing marine life. 

 “We’re one of the few groups who do it,” he said. “That’s a real expertise that the Gulf Center for Sea Turtle Research provides.” 

 Increasingly, those necropsies reveal the same troubling evidence. “When we do necropsies, we routinely find microplastics,” Marshall said. 

 Tiny plastic particles now infiltrate marine food webs throughout the Gulf, often accumulating inside animals that mistake floating debris for food. That growing environmental crisis is one reason the Gulf Center has expanded its mission beyond rescue and rehabilitation alone. 

 The center recently raised approximately $25 million for construction of the new Cheryl Mellenthin Sea Turtle Rehabilitation Hospital and Educational Outreach Center, named for philanthropist Cheryl Mellenthin and the Mark A. Chapman Foundation, whose support helped make the project possible. 

 The new hospital will dramatically expand rehabilitation capabilities while also allowing the public to become part of the conservation process. 

 “In our current little hospital, we are not allowed to have tourists because it’s like, you know, we don’t want visitors in patients’ hospital rooms,” Marshall said. The new facility changes that. 

 “We’ll have an outreach center with non-releasable sea turtles that people can come visit,” he said. “Then they can peek into the hospital a little bit.” 

 Marshall believes sea turtles have a unique ability to inspire environmental stewardship in ways few other animals can. 

 

 “You can get the public’s attention with sea turtles,” he said. “Then we’re going to teach them to be stewards of marine life.” He said the connection often becomes personal once people understand how everyday behavior affects these animals. 

 “If I leave my trash on the beach and that breaks down into microplastics and that can kill sea turtles, then suddenly I’m not going to leave my trash on the beach,” he said. 

 “In that respect, sea turtles are like gateway marine animals,” Marshall said. “They help people understand and have the desire to be stewards of their environment. The beach is more than a place to go get sun and splash in the water.” 

 The Gulf Center relies heavily on public support to continue that mission. Donations help fund rescue operations, rehabilitation supplies, medical care, equipment, and educational outreach. 

 Supporters can contribute financially, sponsor equipment such as UTVs used during patrol season, purchase specialty Texas sea turtle license plates that support conservation efforts, or donate directly through the center’s Amazon Wish List, which provides needed supplies for turtle care. 

 Every rescued turtle, every protected nest, and every hatchling that reaches the Gulf carries forward a species that still returns faithfully to Texas shores. And every set of tracks crossing the sand before dawn offers proof that the story is not over yet. 

 To volunteer with the Sea Aggie Sea Turtle Patrol, sign up through the Gulf Center for Sea Turtle Research at Texas A&M University at Galveston. Volunteers complete spring training, join a patrol team, and help monitor beaches at dawn from April 1 through July 15, locating nests, assisting biologists, and supporting conservation outreach.