For the first time in recorded history, a sea turtle dug a nest and laid eggs on a California beach — not once, but twice in the same month. Scientists think a stretch of unusually warm ocean water opened a path north for a species that almost never leaves the tropics.

  • 2 separate olive ridley sea turtle nests confirmed in Orange County, California
  • 200+ eggs recovered across both nests
  • 45–60 days the eggs typically need to incubate before hatching
  • 25 years NOAA's lead California turtle researcher had studied the coast without seeing this before

A Call That Nearly Knocked Him Off His Chair

Olive ridley sea turtles normally nest in tropical places like Mexico, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica — not Southern California, where the water runs far too cold most years. So when the first nest turned up near Seal Beach on September 16, 2026, and a second appeared eight miles away near the Huntington Beach Pier just three days later, it stunned even the experts.

"I've been studying sea turtles in California for about 25 years," said Jeff Seminoff, who leads the marine turtle ecology and assessment program at NOAA's Southwest Fisheries Science Center. "And when I got that call on the 16th of September, I about fell out of my chair, to be honest."

"We're also experiencing sustained warm water temperatures for some time now," Seminoff explained. "What that has probably done is created sort of a warm water bridge that creates this opening for turtles that might be in the high seas or in tropical areas to come into these temperate habitats to nest."

Racing a Hurricane to Save the Eggs

Researchers initially planned to leave the nests exactly where the turtles had dug them. Then Hurricane Polo threatened to flood the sites, and an inter-agency team — including the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the U.S. Navy, and California State University, Long Beach — made the call to move the eggs before the storm hit.

Both clutches, more than 200 eggs combined, were transferred to the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach, where they now sit in climate-controlled incubation boxes meant to mimic the sand they came from. There is no parental care in sea turtle biology — a mother lays her eggs and leaves for good — so the eggs' survival now rests entirely with the Aquarium's team.

Could This Be the Start of a New Nesting Beach?

Biologists aren't sure yet whether the eggs are even fertile. But if hatchlings emerge, they'll be released on the same beaches where the eggs were laid, giving them a shot at "natal imprinting" — the instinct that drives sea turtles back to their birth beach roughly 15 to 20 years later to nest themselves.

As NPR reported, Dr. Cali Turner Tomaszewicz used scute patterns and barnacle placement — a kind of turtle fingerprint — to confirm the two nesting turtles were in fact different individuals, not one turtle making a return trip. Researchers are now watching nearby beaches closely, since olive ridleys typically nest two or three times per season, roughly two weeks apart.

Nobody is calling this a new tradition yet. But if Southern California's waters keep running warm, Seminoff isn't ruling it out: "We'll see," he said. For now, two turtles that likely got swept off course by a changing ocean may have just given California its first homegrown sea turtles.