The turtle nesting season at South Padre Island is over, with more nests than ever in the more than 30 year recorded history at Sea Turtle Inc. It's a sign that today's beach patrols and artificial nest management strategies are working, even if volunteers and staff are fighting an uphill battle.

This year, the season ended later than usual, in late September. Volunteers counted 104 nests in the patrol area from Boca Chica Beach to the Port Mansfield East Cut. 96 of them were the endangered Kemp's Ridley sea turtle species, which uses the shoreline in South Texas and northern Mexico as a nesting homeland. The remaining nests were green sea turtles and loggerheads.

"This nesting season has been our biggest season yet," said Amy Bonka, Chief Conservation Officer at Sea Turtle Inc.

The Kemp's Ridley sea turtle remains endangered under the Endangered Species Act. A famous video shot in 1947 near Rancho Nuevo, Tamaulipas showed an estimated 42 thousand nesting females at one time in a phenomenon known locally as "arribada," in which the turtles land in large waves. That safety-in-numbers survival strategy of the species would end up leading to its decline. Human intervention, hunting and egg harvesting nearly wiped out the species.

A single year of good nesting is a positive sign, but Dr. Donna Shaver has been working on sea turtle conservation for more than 35, and she's far more concerned about the long-term.

"Beaches are eroding, nesting beaches are disappearing," Shaver said, speaking by Zoom from her office at the Padre Island National Seashore, a protected refuge of 66 miles that runs north from the Port Mansfield East Cut to the outskirts of Corpus Christi.

Kemp's Ridley hatchlings develop under an unusual temperature-based phenomenon. If temperatures are warmer, the majority are born female. If temperatures are cooler, more are born male. From 1979 to 2011, 70.8 percent of hatchlings were born female, according to Shaver. Because of declining species numbers after the mid-20th century, a team of researchers recommended incubating the eggs at the temperatures needed to keep the roughly 3:1 ratio, allowing for more future mothers to be born.

But if temperatures were to rise, that sex ratio would doom the species. It's happening to some extent to the other six sea turtle species found worldwide.

"Some nesting beaches have been severely affected already by increasing global temperatures,” Shaver said. “And they've found that the sand became too hot for the eggs to hatch — it killed the embryos during development because it reached lethal temperatures. Also, it produced 100 percent females."

According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, global temperatures have risen by more than 1.8 degrees in the last 130 years.

A more urgent concern is the effect of rising tides. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, sea level is expected to rise about 11 inches in the next 28 years. Shaver says those effects are more noticeable.

“Now we have climate change that we're dealing with," she said. "We have nuisance coastal flooding which occurs 90 days per year and is increasing exponentially."

That's causing the team on Padre Island National Seashore to relocate controlled nesting grounds. But on that barrier island in some places as narrow as half a mile, beachfront is finite. Concerns about the species' recovery in the face of rising temperatures and tides will continue into the future.