One leatherback nest and 29,412 others on the Quintana Roo coast this season

Turtle camps across Quintana Roo logged 29,413 nests by the end of July, a preliminary count covering roughly half of the 2026 sea turtle nesting season.

The figure comes from the state body that compiles the camps' reports, the Comité Estatal de Protección, Conservación, Investigación y Manejo de las Tortugas Marinas de Quintana Roo, known as CETMQROO. It was presented as a cutoff, not a season total, and the committee has been explicit that the number will move.

The distance between a July cutoff and an October season is where the story sits for anyone living on this coast. Nests logged in June and July are still in the sand now, on the same beaches where hotels and beach clubs operate and where people walk at night, and Tulum's municipal government has described the town as one of the most important nesting destinations in the world.

Green turtles, and one leatherback

Of the nests in the July cut, 25,685 were green turtle (Chelonia mydas), the species that dominates the records on this shoreline. Loggerhead, Caretta caretta, accounted for 2,771. Hawksbill (Eretmochelys imbricata) accounted for 956.

That leaves one. A single leatherback nest, Dermochelys coriacea, in the entire state.

The scarcity is not new. A Quintana Roo government bulletin from August 2019 reported just over 11,500 nests under protection at a comparable point in that season, with one solitary leatherback among them. The two counts were not assembled the same way and do not make a clean comparison, but the leatherback line reads exactly as it did then.

Camp reports feed the state's sea turtle nesting figure

CETMQROO does not count nests. The camps do, and the committee compiles what they send through its commissions, including Conservation, Research, and Environmental Education.

Its sessions also handle the part that never reaches a nest total. Camps bring the problems they are hitting in the field, from conditions on specific stretches of sand to situations that put nests or nesting females at risk, and those discussions produce agreed actions rather than figures.

The federal environmental prosecutor, PROFEPA, takes part, alongside academic institutions and civil organizations. Each acts within its own authority, which makes the committee the point where something a camp notices on a beach reaches the institution able to do something about it.

The committee meets three times a year and keeps updating the camp data between sessions.

Cancun alone has since counted 10,407 nests

Municipal bulletins reviewed by The Tulum Times show how fast the July figure aged.

The Benito Juárez ecology department reported on September 8 that Cancun held 10,407 protected nests this season, with more than 1.2 million eggs and 203,994 hatchlings recorded. Cozumel reported more than 4,000 protected nests on August 6, approaching the roughly 5,200 the island counted across all of last season. Playa del Carmen put its own total at 2,000 nests in late August, 1,200 of them inside the polygon the municipality monitors directly and the rest handled by hotels, private operators and civil associations.

The Cancun report arose from a specific case. A nest had been laid outside a protection corral near a beachfront hotel, and some hatchlings were exposed to predators in daylight. The department said a nest left in place is not in itself an irregularity, and that it was reviewing the circumstances with PROFEPA.

Those municipal numbers carry different cutoff dates and, in places, different definitions of what counts as a protected nest, so they cannot be stacked against the state figure. What they show is direction. The beaches are already ahead of 29,413.

Tulum's share of the total, still unpublished

The July cut carries no municipal breakdown. How many of those nests sit on Tulum beaches is not public information, and will not be until the committee publishes a fuller account.

What is documented is the structure around them. The municipal government runs the Kanan Ak turtle camp, and Mayor Diego Castañón Trejo walked the beaches in May at the season's opening, calling Tulum one of the world's most important nesting sites and noting that four of the seven sea turtle species reach its shores. Flora, Fauna y Cultura de México operates a separate program across 14 nesting beaches in the Riviera Maya and Tulum corridor, which the organization says has protected more than 20 million hatchlings over three decades.

The guidance the municipality issued in May has not changed. Keep clear of marked nests, cut beach lighting at night, keep vehicles and furniture off nesting areas, and report a turtle on the sand to 911.

Hatching runs roughly six to ten weeks behind laying, which puts the nests inside the July count on the beach right now, in the weeks when hatchlings make their first run to the water.

The committee meets again in November

November 2026 is when CETMQROO reviews the season with more detailed information, including the final nest count and the main conservation indicators. Until that session, 29,413 stays a preliminary number, and the comparison everyone wants, whether 2026 outperforms the seasons before it, has nothing solid to rest on.

Have you found a marked turtle nest on a Tulum beach this season? Join the conversation and share your perspective with us on Instagram and Facebook at @thetulumtimes.