Keewaydin Island Near Naples Breaks Its Sea Turtle Nesting Record This Season

Keewaydin Island, the undeveloped barrier island between Naples and Marco Island, is having a record season for sea turtle nests. According to reporting by Naples Press, Conservancy of Southwest Florida senior biologist Jeff Schmid said the count reached 636 nests as of August 27, 2026, passing the previous record of 628 nests set in 2022. More than 29,200 hatchlings have been recorded so far this season, with more than two months of nesting still ahead. Collier County's own count, which does not include Keewaydin, showed 1,595 total nests as of an August 16 update, the county's most recent figure at the time the story ran.

I am Kris Asquith, Broker Associate at Premiere Plus Realty, and I sell across nine Southwest Florida markets including Naples.

It is an eight-mile-long barrier island reachable mainly by boat, sitting along the same stretch of Gulf coastline between Naples and Marco Island. There is no bridge or public road onto it, which is part of why it has stayed undeveloped while both cities around it grew. That same isolation is what makes it usable as a nesting beach at the scale these numbers describe: long, quiet stretches of sand with far less nightly foot and light disturbance than a developed beach carries.

The Conservancy of Southwest Florida, a Naples-based nonprofit, has run the monitoring program on the island since 1983, when biologists were recording around 50 nests a year.

Early on a recent Thursday morning, Worley and Schmid were excavating nests that had reached their 60-day incubation mark, checking for any eggs still hatching. In the last nest they checked, two eggs were just beginning to "pip," or break from the shell, after more than 25 hatchlings from that same nest, out of 77 eggs laid, had already crossed roughly 50 feet of sand to the water on their own. Worley said that particular nest sat low on the beach and had taken on enough high tide to lower its hatch rate. Farther south on the island, Conservancy intern Christian Raddatz found two more eggs pipping in a separate nest.

The excavation process itself is what produces these numbers. Three days after a nest shows a hatched depression, biologists dig it out and count hatched versus unhatched eggs. One nest Worley and Schmid opened held 79 eggs total, 58 hatched and 21 that never developed, giving them a concrete, countable read on that nest's outcome rather than a guess. Schmid said tracks in the sand also help the team estimate how many hatchlings actually reached the water, since sea turtles hatch in a mass on purpose, to overwhelm whatever predators happen to be waiting nearby that night.

Interns like Raddatz, who graduated from Southern Illinois University in 2025 with a wildlife biology degree, carry a lot of that fieldwork. During the height of nesting season, the internship runs overnight shifts on all-terrain vehicles to find and tag nesting females, then shifts to daytime nest monitoring and excavation later in the season. Raddatz described the hours as intense but worth it: "I'm just trying to do a little bit of everything and get as much experience as I can."

Worley, who has spent 31 years with the Conservancy, said the jump from roughly 50 nests in 1983 to more than 600 now cannot be credited to one change. She pointed to decades of layered conservation work: legal protections for nesting beaches, required turtle-excluder devices in shrimp trawl nets, and cages built around nests on Keewaydin to cut losses from raccoons and other predators. "We can see the fruits of our efforts," she said. "About 30 years later, we're starting to see the results."

Schmid credited this particular season in part to a quiet year for major storms, and echoed the longer view: protecting the nesting beach only carries a species so far. "You can protect the nesting beach, but if you don't protect them in their foraging areas, then it's kind of a lost cause," he said. Even with the record, the underlying odds are steep. Worley said only about one in a thousand hatchlings reaches adulthood, which is why the higher nest and hatchling counts matter as a cumulative buffer against those odds rather than a guarantee for any one nest.

Nobody can honestly put a number on what a strong sea turtle season does to nearby property values, and be skeptical of anyone who tries. What it does confirm, credibly, is that this stretch of Collier County coastline between Naples and Marco Island still functions as working, undisturbed nesting habitat after decades of effort to keep it that way, which is a fact about the water itself rather than about any specific listing.

Buyers looking at Naples waterfront homes, Naples Gulf-access homes or Naples beachfront condos are buying near a coastline where a nonprofit has run an active field program for more than four decades, with interns pulling overnight shifts on the beach through the height of the season. That is a different kind of context than a single new opening or closure, and it says something durable about the coastline rather than about any one property's price.

As one honest data point about the health of the coastline, not as anything that moves a number on a specific address. The things that actually decide what a property near the water costs to buy and keep are the ones a story like this never covers: elevation, the insurance that follows from it, what a condo association holds in reserves, and what an inspection turns up on that specific address. The home buying process walks through where each of those gets checked, in order, before you are under contract.

If you are weighing a property near Naples, Marco Island or anywhere else across the nine markets I cover, get in touch or call (239) 300-1427 for a straight read on a specific address rather than the coastline in general.