Scheduled for publication on July 20, 2026, this incident spotlights a growing threat to endangered marine species along Belize’s coastlines, where loggerhead sea turtles are legally protected from harm. Last week, a routine beach walk on a private stretch of Ambergris Caye uncovered a devastating loss that has local conservation advocates calling for urgent government action.
The grim discovery was made by Joshua Seguro, an employee at the property owned by coastal residents Scott and Maria Sussman. While walking along the sand, Seguro spotted dozens of motionless tiny hatchlings tangled in dense, floating mats of sargassum, a brown seaweed that has increasingly piled up on Caribbean coasts in recent years. All of the hatchlings had died before they could complete their critical first journey from the nesting sand to the open ocean.
“While on the beach I looked down at my feet and saw a bunch of baby turtles hatchlings. I immediately identified them as loggerheads and I said oh no, these are dead, we have to contact the Fisheries Department,” Seguro explained in an interview with News Five. “From our observation it appeared to be an entire clutch that passed away. We counted up to fifty-two and it could be more. So I am fully convinced it is the sargassum that killed them.”
Maria Sussman recounted the moment the group surveyed the full extent of the loss, saying: “We all rushed to the beach but they were all dead and we wanted to see what happened, and first we saw very close to the beach about seventeen turtles, then we started walking further on our pier and from both sides of the pier we started seeing more and more dead turtles stuck in the sargassum.”
For property owner Scott Sussman, the incident is not just a single tragedy—it is a warning of a much larger unreported crisis unfolding across Belize’s unmonitored coastlines and uninhabited islands. “I think it is a tragedy. Like Josh said this is something we happened to find, and a neighbor happened to find another instance a mile down the beach,” Sussman noted. “So, who knows how often this is happening and where. This is just two groups of people who saw this. All these uninhabited islands and everywhere else, it could be hundreds of turtles dying every month during the hatching season.”
Sussman is pushing for the Belizean government to intervene and implement coordinated measures to manage sargassum accumulations on nesting beaches during critical hatching windows, to prevent further unnecessary deaths of this protected species. Local authorities are urging any beachgoer who encounters dead or distressed loggerhead turtles along the coast to contact the Belize Fisheries Department immediately to report the sighting.