The Turtle Lady

Maura Kraus is retiring after 42 years with Collier County overseeing turtles on local beaches. ANDREA STETSON / FLORIDA WEEKLY

When a record-breaking 2,155 turtle nests were laid in Collier County last season, Maura Kraus knew her more than four decades of helping save these reptiles were paying off. Now, after 42 years, Kraus, principal environmental specialist for Collier County, has retired. Just days before leaving the helm, she spoke about her many years there and the significant changes she had seen.

Kraus has done everything from spending her nights on Keewaydin Island battling swarms of mosquitoes to help the turtles, beginning a Head Start program for these critters, and helping create land development codes to protect them.

In the Beginning

Kraus was born and raised in Fort Lauderdale, where she enjoyed heading to the beach, going on marine biology trips in high school and fishing near her home.

“I was one of those baby oil babies on the beach,” she reminisced.

While working on her master’s degree in coastal zone management from NOVA Institute of Coastal Studies, she came to Collier County for an internship and decided this was where she wanted to stay.

Maura Kraus releases a green turtle in the Gulf of Mexico, about a mile west of Gordon Pass, following its rehab at Clearwater Marine Aquarium. COURTESY PHOTO

One of her first jobs was on Keewaydin Island, where she relocated nests to a hatchery area. Back then, turtle experts didn’t put cages over the nests to protect them from predators. Instead, they moved the nests to a protected hatchery area on the island.

“They were doing that all around the state,” Kraus described. “Instead of putting cages on it, they moved the nests. Back then everybody in the state was just trying to figure that out.”

During nesting season, she spent three years on Keewaydin Island, getting to know the terrain and the local fishermen.

“I would help the commercial fishermen pull their mullet nets on the beach, and I would get fish,” she described. “Everybody would help everybody. It was the early 80s, and Keewaydin wasn’t the hot spot back then.”

In the mid-80s, she helped Collier County write its growth management plan and regulations for lighting and beach furniture. Back then, there were no Amber LED lights, so people were told to use sensor lights that would go on when they walked by. They were also told to put shields on the lights to keep them from shining on the beach.

A retirement party was staged May 4 at Liki Tiki BBQ in Naples, where Maura posed for a picture with her family: son-in-law Aaron Mann, daughter Christina holding son Maverick, Maura and son Logan, and Maura’s granddaughter, Harper, in front. JEN CARDENAS / COURTESY PHOTO

“Technology is constantly changing,” Kraus said. “They are always coming up with better lights.”

Turtle hatchlings follow the light from the horizon to find the water, and artificial light can send them scurrying the wrong way, so lights are not allowed to shine on the beach during turtle nesting season.

One of her most significant projects in the 1980s was Head Start. Every year Kraus would get 50 green turtles from the east coast of Florida and 50 loggerheads from Collier County. They would go to a hatchery and, once hatched, be put in tanks where they were fed well and grew fast. The young turtles were released when they were about nine months old. The program was started to give these young turtles a fighting chance.

Maura Kraus waited by a truck 25 years ago with co-workers and a Naples Police officer at Vanderbilt Beach. The truck from Sea World in Orlando was returning a loggerhead turtle — one that had been injured and rescued in Collier County — after its rehabilitation. Kraus was part of the team that released the turtle into the Gulf of Mexico. COURTESY PHOTO

When they leave the nest, hatchlings are about the size of a quarter, so they are prey for many birds and fish. But by nine months, they are much bigger and have a better chance of survival. She ran the Head Start program for two years through the Conservancy of Southwest Florida and for another three years through funding from local fishermen and Boat Haven Marina.

“They had a better chance of survival because they have more predators when they are smaller than bigger,” Kraus explained. “We were feeding them every day so they were bigger. We had the program for a total of five years, and then the state stopped it because they wanted to make sure we were not interfering with their development process. They stopped those programs all around the state.”

Kraus said the state and turtle experts were trying all different things to help save sea turtles, especially when the number of nests started to drop drastically. In 2005, there were only 444 nests laid in Collier County. Five years later, in 2010, there were 760 nests. While the numbers were increasing, they were much lower than the 1,011 nests laid in 2000. Kraus said one of the problems had been turtles getting caught in fishermen’s nets. In 1987, Turtle Excluder Devices (TED) were made mandatory. This invention allowed turtles to escape from the nets. Kraus said commercial fishing hooks and other methods started to become more turtle friendly. But that didn’t mean the numbers suddenly skyrocketed. A female turtle takes 30-35 years to mature enough to lay eggs.

“Now we are finally seeing the results of what we were doing 30- 35 years ago,” Kraus said. “I look at these turtles coming up and think, ‘You are my babies.’ It is a huge effort.”

By 2012, the numbers broke the 1,000 barrier once again, with 1,259 nests laid that year in Collier County, and the numbers kept increasing. In 2022, there were 1,990 nests, and in 2023, the record breaking 2,155 nests.

Terrific Times with Turtles

Kraus says she will miss being among the turtles and all the turtles talk in the county. Over the last four decades, she has had some terrific times.

In the 1980s, she remembers taking a helicopter trip along the coast each season to check on the beaches and survey nests. She also has fond memories of her turtle adventures.

“The year before, we had a ghost crab on the beach, and he had a baby (turtle) in his mouth, and he was holding the baby, and I ran up to him, and he dropped the turtle, and the little baby ran right back in its nest. I had never seen anything like that before,” Kraus recalled.

Kraus talked about a turtle named Nickel that was found on a local beach and could not live in the wild after swallowing a nickel, so the turtle now lives at the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago.

She told the story of a little boy on Marco who regularly watched nests.

“One thing I am going to really miss is kids and educating the kids,” she stated.

She also spoke of how she enjoyed taking time to educate adults.

“The last few years, there has been a bunch of ladies that come to every nest that has hatched and they became the educators of the public,” Kraus said. “That was always nice to have a support system on the beach. You can get your work done and still educate the public. That was fun.”

Her friends and colleagues have had a terrific time turtling with Kraus. Dave Addison, a retired senior biologist from the Conservancy of Southwest Florida, worked with her for many years.

“She gets a lot of points for being incredibly dedicated and persistent,” Addison began. “She is just incredibly dedicated to doing what is right for sea turtles. I certainly have a tremendous amount of respect for all the work she has done over the years for all of the county. She was a lot of fun to work with. We spent a lot of time riding up and down the beach on the ATVs. Her heart is always in the right place where turtles are concerned.”

“She was a great mentor and great friend,” added Mary Toro, environmental specialist for Collier County, who has worked with Krause for the past 23 years. “Maura is very dedicated. She has a huge passion for conserving all the sea turtles. She has a great personality. She is easy to work with. She has worked with so many organizations, state agencies and local agencies and to the day she left, people were telling her how much she would be missed. She had a huge area to cover, and she did it for 42 years. It is just amazing.”

Eve Haverfield, founder and president of Turtle Time, a non-profit organization that monitors sea turtles in south Lee County, has known Maura for 35 years.

“She was always available when people would call,” Haverfield began. “She was always there, and if I had any issues she was always there to help me. She did a whole lot more than what I have to do in Lee County. I do specific beaches, but she had to do all of Collier County. She was just an excellent, excellent sea turtle scientist and she would make this fantastic fish chowder. I am going to miss her.”

Ready for Retirement

Kraus is now 65 and says she is ready for retirement.

“I want to spend time with my family,” she said.

That includes spending time with her 7-year-old granddaughter, 8-month-old grandson and golden retriever, Spooner. She plans to spend a lot of time on the beach, and after the mandatory one-year state retirement requirement is up, she plans to volunteer to help sea turtles. (State and county employees must wait one year before volunteering or working for another state or county organization.)

Kraus will miss the turtles, but she knows she is leaving at a time when they are doing well.

“I think they will have a good year,” Kraus concluded. “I think they will continue having good years and good nesting.” ¦

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