Sea Turtle Friendly Lighting Basics


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For those living in coastal areas of the south, its time to start thinking about making your exterior lighting turtle friendly. The reason for this is that waterfront homes share the beach with nesting sea turtles. Unfortunately, this hasn’t been an equal sharing and the sea turtles have suffered significantly. According to the Florida Fish & Wildlife Conservation Commission (FFWCC), all species of sea turtles native to Florida waters are either threatened or endangered. Beachside lighting is a major contributing factor. It turns out that sea turtles simply can’t deal with the round the clock day time we’ve created with all of our exterior lights. Fear not. There is a simple solution. Make sure that all of your homes exterior lights are turtle friendly. Not quite sure what turtle friendly is? Keep reading and we’ll make this clear.
If you’re familiar with dark sky lighting requirements, you’re halfway there. Turtle Friendly Lighting goes beyond “dark sky” lighting requirements in that it also speaks to the type of light produced by your fixture as well as the way your fixture is mounted. Turtle Friendly Lighting has 3 principles:
Keep It Shielded - Also a dark sky principle - All light is directed down to the ground
Keep It Long - Use only long wavelength “turtle friendly” light bulbs
Keep It Low - Lower mounting heights are less likely to invade critical sea turtle nesting areas
Shielded fixtures, also known by the technical term of ‘full cutoff fixtures’, aim all the light they produce down to the ground where people are walking and driving. They have solid tops and sides that prevent light from shining in places it doesn’t belong. The combination of full cutoff optics and turtle friendly light bulbs has been proven to be the least disruptive outdoor lighting solution for sensitive sea turtle nesting areas.
Turtle Safe light bulbs use a special mono-chromatic coating. These red bulbs, limit the spectrum of the light that is emitted to a very narrow band of the visible spectrum. You’ve seen the way a prism splits light into all the colors of the rainbow. White light contains all these colors together. This is pretty much what a ’standard’ incandescent light bulb produces. Turtle Safe coatings block much of this and only allows light at the very long (red) end of the spectrum to be emitted. This long wavelength light has been proven in numerous studies to have less of an impact on nesting sea turtles than other types of light. Turtle Safe bulbs will have this coating applied directly to the bulb.
However, there are situations where this is not practical. In some situations, it is not possible or desirable to coat the bulbs. To address these situations, you can also make use of a Turtle Safe Mask. This is essentially a turtle safe coating applied to a plastic film. This film can then be affixed to the glass of existing fixtures… or otherwise used to limit the output of a bulb or fixture to only the Turtle Safe wavelengths.
Note: This only works well with compact fluorescent bulbs. Incandescents, metal halides, etc produce a light that is not conducive to working with this coating.
Also Note: As these filters limit the light being output to a very narrow band of the visible spectrum… they don’t put out as many lumens as a comparable bulb.
For planning purposes, expect these to put out roughly 1/3 the number of lumens as a non-filtered bulb. If you’re looking for a certain # of lumens, you will need to use higher wattage bulbs to achieve the desired number of lumens.

As you can see, this is pretty simple stuff. With just a little effort, we can make changes that will allow sea turtles to continue to thrive alongside us… as they have for millions of years.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 6th, 2008 at 6:00 am and is filed under Fluorescent Lighting, Outdoor Lighting, Starry Night Lights, Wildlife Lighting, environment, sea turtle friendly lighting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Sea Turtle Friendly Lighting Basics

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