Olive Ridley Sea Turtle Hatching Success as a Function of Microbial Abundance and the Microenvironment of In Situ Nest Sand at Ostional, Costa Rica

Table 1

Relationships between hatching success and partial pressure of oxygen (pO₂) and temperature in the first (1st) and second (2nd) half of incubation, bacterial and fungal abundance, and organic matter content for all study nests. Copy number data from several nests fell outside the range of detection for the present analysis and were therefore left out (see Section 3 for more details). Hatching success was positively correlated with nest pO₂ in both the first and second half of incubation and negatively correlated with the bacterial abundance in nest sand.

Variable	Half of incubation period	Hatching success
		pO2	1st	0.872	13	<0.001
2nd	0.591		13	0.020
Temperature	1st		13	0.929
	2nd		13	0.459
Bacterial abundance			12	0.046
Fungal abundance			10	0.063
Organic matter content			13	0.185

: Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient and : sample size. Values in bold indicate statistically significant correlations.