Two turtles came ashore in California — and made history, twice

On September 16, a beachgoer in Seal Beach watched a small sea turtle with a heart-shaped shell dig into the sand and lay her eggs in plain daylight. Three days later, another turtle did the same near the Huntington Beach Pier, eight miles away. No sea turtle has ever been recorded nesting on the West Coast of the United States. With Hurricane Polo sending dangerous surf toward the shore, federal and state scientists collected the roughly 200 eggs from the two nests and drove them to the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach, where they are incubating in a climate-controlled room. If they hatch — expected 45 to 60 days after they were laid — the hatchlings will be released on the same beaches their mothers chose, for their first crawl to the ocean.