“Sadly, this is not the first time we’ve seen a case like this,” Lexie Beach, communications coordinator for Sea Turtle Conservancy, told The Dodo. “Most commonly, the issue we see regarding beach chairs and sea turtles is that they actually run into them when trying to nest on the beach. Many times they’ve actually gotten stuck in a chair and rescued the next morning, or running into the chair causes them to false crawl (not nest) and head back to the ocean.”
For Kemp’s ridley sea turtles, every life lost is so significant. There are only around 1,000 left in the wild today, mainly due to habitat loss, illegal hunting and pollution.