Gulf of Mexico & U.S. Southeast: 5 of the 7 sea turtle species, 4 of them nesting.
Gulf of Mexico & U.S. Southeast
Texas round to North Carolina, plus the whole Gulf
The busiest turtle nursery in North America. Florida alone takes over 100,000 loggerhead nests in a good year, and the shallow Gulf is the only place on Earth an adult Kemp’s ridley calls home.
Nests here 4
Females crawl up these beaches to lay eggs — and feed in these waters too.
Leatherback Dermochelys coriacea
A few hundred leatherback nests a year on Florida’s east coast, the northern edge of their Atlantic nesting range.
Green Chelonia mydas
Florida’s green turtle nesting has climbed steeply since the 1980s, from a few hundred nests to tens of thousands.
Loggerhead Caretta caretta
Florida’s Atlantic beaches take over 100,000 loggerhead nests in a good year — the biggest count outside Oman.
Kemp's Ridley Lepidochelys kempii
Rancho Nuevo in Tamaulipas, Mexico takes about 95% of all Kemp’s ridley nests on Earth. A few come ashore in Texas.
Feeds here 1
Turtles live and eat here, but no beach in this basin gets their nests.
Hawksbill Eretmochelys imbricata
Uncommon here. Young hawksbills turn up on the reefs of the Florida Keys, but they do not nest on the mainland.
Why sea turtles live where they live
A sea turtle needs three different places, and they are usually nowhere near each other. It needs a warm sandy beach to nest on, because the eggs have to be buried in sand warm enough to develop — that is also why the temperature of the sand decides whether a hatchling is a boy or a girl. It needs a feeding ground, which for a green turtle means seagrass meadows, for a hawksbill means a coral reef, and for a leatherback means wherever the jellyfish are. And it needs the open ocean currents in between, which young turtles ride for years before they ever come near a coast.
Because a female almost always returns to nest in the region where she hatched, turtle populations stay put over enormous spans of time. That is why a loggerhead feeding off Baja California in the eastern Pacific is not a “local” turtle at all: it hatched in Japan and swam nearly 8,000 miles to get there. Finding the way back is a whole story on its own — sea turtles navigate using the Earth’s magnetic field.
Where do sea turtles live in the United States?
Six species use U.S. waters. Loggerheads, greens and leatherbacks all nest on the beaches of Florida, Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina. Kemp’s ridleys nest mainly in Mexico but spend their lives in the Gulf of Mexico, and juveniles ride the Gulf Stream as far north as Nova Scotia. Hawksbills turn up on the reefs of the Florida Keys, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Green and hawksbill turtles also nest in Hawaii and the Pacific islands.
The three things this map cannot show you
- It is simplified on purpose. Real range maps have ragged edges and gaps. These eight blobs are a way to hold the whole world in your head at once, not a survey chart.
- Turtles wander. A single Kemp’s ridley has been recorded near the Azores and in the Mediterranean. One lost turtle is not a range, so strays like that are left off.
- Population trends differ. Some nesting populations have recovered while others remain in severe trouble. A broad range on a map does not show a population’s health. Compare the current conservation assessments.
Where this data comes from
Nesting regions, feeding grounds and conservation status are taken from NOAA Fisheries’ sea turtle species profiles, the IUCN Red List assessments by the Marine Turtle Specialist Group, the nesting-site atlas published by SWOT, The State of the World’s Sea Turtles, and — for the flatback, which never enters U.S. waters — the Australian Government’s flatback turtle profile. Checked August 2026.
Now swim it yourself
Hatch on the beach, cross the ocean, dodge the sharks and come back to nest — the same 10,000-mile round trip a real sea turtle makes.
Play the lifecycle game →