Turtles and Sharks in Key Largo

Turtles

The 5 types of sea turtles in the Florida Keys are the Loggerhead, Green, Hawksbill, Leatherback and Kemp’s Ridley.  This represents 5 of the 7 species of sea turtles, all are on the endangered list.

If you want to know more about how to identify these different turtles the Sea Turtle Conservancy has a nice process to help you do this.

This guy was seen having a snack on French reef late 2017

We spotted this Hawksbill turtle just off Key Largo Dry rocks whilst we were conducting a debris clear-up on Sunday 28

November. Key Largo Dry Rocks is in the John Pennekcamp State Park. This fella was not to far from the Statue of Christ. You can see from the video we surprised him a little during his snacking.  We were careful not to get too close to him or disturb him too much.  After a few moments he seemed to feel that we were no threat to him and continued with is snack.  This is the way we like to video our wildlife, so they do not feel threatened, we could have got closer but the chances are he would have been disturbed too much and swim off.

Here we see a sleepy little turtle catching some shut eye on one of our dives to the wreck of the Benwood. Courtesy of our friend Tanner for the video

Sharks

We see a number of different types of sharks in Key Largo, mainly Reef Sharks, Nurse sharks and some Bull sharks.

There are however visitors to our shores that are a little larger.  Great Whites are known to move up and down the east coast of the US from Maine to Key West.  If you want to see progress of these magnificent creatures go to the Ocearch website who track a number of great whites in Florida. This site also tracks turtles!

Heres some footage of a nice reef shark on Molasses reef in July 2017. This guy kind of surprised us more than we surprised him! We had just got into the water and were still under the boat when he came to investigate. Once he realized we were not food he swam off!

Nurse Sharks

We see a lot of Nurse sharks on the reef to the extent where we see them on most trips to the reef. You can often see Nurse Sharks either resting under rocks or patrolling the reefs for food.