Defenders Magazine

Surf's Up for These Sea Turtles

The endangered Kemp's Ridley surfaces thanks to some help from its friends.

By Wendee Holtcamp

© Doug Perrine/SeaPics.com

As the golden sun rises above the Gulf of Mexico, Donna Shaver kneels on the beach at Padre Island National Seashore in Texas. One by one, the park ranger removes more than 100 wriggling, two-inch-long Kemp's ridley sea turtle hatchlings from a cooler filled with sand—their home for the past two months—and places each on the ground. She smiles maternally as she watches the hatchlings scurry toward the waves, oblivious to the crowd of onlookers at North Padre Island. Kids chatter and point as the hatchlings crawl down the sand, lumber over seaweed and merge with the surf. When the last turtle enters the sea, everyone cheers.

This summer's nesting season will turn out to be one for the record books: 100 Kemp's ridley nests along the Texas coast in 2006, up from 51 in 2005. After many years of hard work by conservationists in both Texas and Mexico, this endangered sea turtle species appears to be turning the corner in its fight for survival. "No two ways about it, it's thrilling," says Shaver, who started out more than 25 years ago as a volunteer on the Texas sea turtle recovery effort and is now the project's chief scientist. "We saw real progress this year."

Named after Richard Kemp, a fisherman who sent the first specimen to Harvard University for identification in 1906, Kemp's ridleys are the smallest of the world's sea turtles, weighing in at under 100 pounds. Mexicans call them tortuga lora, which means "parrot turtle." The turtles use their parrot-like beak to chomp crabs, their favorite food. While their closest relatives, olive ridleys, range worldwide in tropical waters, Kemp's ridleys live primarily in the Gulf of Mexico and have become the most critically endangered sea turtle. Their unusual mass-nesting behavior sets ridley turtles apart from all others. Mating occurs at sea, then some unknown elixir of moonlight, wind direction and season sends thousands of females to shore to lay eggs—a phenomenon known as an arribada. Females crawl on land, dig pear-shaped cavities with their hind flippers, lay around 100 pliable eggs, cover the nest up and scuttle back to sea.

Although biologists and fishermen had seen adult Kemp's ridleys at sea, their nesting site remained a mystery for years. Then in 1960 a scratchy 1947 home movie was rediscovered showing thousands of Kemp's ridleys emerging from the ocean in broad daylight, crawling on top of one another to dig their nests. But no one knew where the arribada had been filmed. Soon after the movie surfaced, however, biologists discovered the 20-mile stretch where Kemp's ridleys nested—Rancho Nuevo in southern Tamaulipas, Mexico. By then, the population had plummeted because of rampant egg collection and carnage by shrimpers' nets offshore. Mexicans prized the eggs as food or for purported aphrodisiac qualities, and gathered them up to sell or eat. Birds, coyotes and other predators also scavenged many nests.

About 42,000 females nested the day memorialized by the film, estimated the late Archie Carr, a University of Florida professor widely acknowledged as the father of sea turtle biology. By 1970, numbers of nesting females had plummeted to 2,500, and by 1977 to 1,200. "The figures speak for themselves," Carr wrote in a 1977 letter to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, urging immediate action to curb shrimp trawling off the nesting grounds and protection of the Mexican nesting beach. "The species is clearly on the skids, and if present conditions continue it will shortly…be gone." Carr encouraged people to write the Mexican president, saying in part, "Only a wholehearted effort by your government can save it."

The government responded. In 1977 Mexico protected Rancho Nuevo as a national reserve and forged a partnership with the United States to recover the ridleys. To safeguard against a possible catastrophe at Rancho Nuevo, biologists decided to try to create a new nesting beach by "imprinting" hatchlings on American sand and surf. At 60 miles long, North Padre Island is the longest undeveloped barrier island in the United States, and a few ridleys historically nested here—making it an ideal location for such an experiment. Between 1978 and 1988, biologists collected 2,000 eggs per year from Mexico and placed them in coolers filled with Padre Island sand. Volunteers drove the eggs more than 200 miles north on slow, bumpy roads to incubate at Padre Island National Seashore.

The incubation facility at the national seashore is still in use today, although it is now used to hatch eggs from nests found on the Texas coast. Inside the darkened, warm room rows of coolers line the walls, testament to the recent successful nesting season. A volunteer spritzes water on the sandy nest inside a cooler and tells us hatchlings have poked their heads out.

"It's important we stay quiet," says Shaver. "We don't want to send them into a frenzy." Once the turtles hatch, they wiggle upward through the sand and rest just under the surface. Triggered by an unknown cue, they begin the famous hatchling frenzy—madly moving flippers—which in the wild allows them to reach the sea. Once the frenzy starts, biologists get them to the beach within 90 minutes—ideally at a time when the public can watch. "It's like having a baby," says Shaver. "You don't know exactly when they're going to go."

DEFENDING SEA TURTLES IN MEXICO

All but one of the world's sea turtle species nest along Mexico's shores, making conservation efforts south of the border crucial to the survival of these animals. In 1990, Mexico banned the taking of sea turtles and all trade in sea turtle products. Unfortunately, illegal capture and trade have continued, undermining efforts to bolster sea turtle populations. Last year, thanks in large part to lobbying by Defenders of Wildlife, the Mexican Congress passed a measure to give authorities additional power to combat sea turtle poaching. At the same time, Defenders and other conservation groups launched a national educational campaign calling on Mexicans to stop eating or trading sea turtles. The effort included hundreds of billboards and bus stop ads in cities across the country featuring Mexican soccer stars urging people to protect turtles.  "The campaign has been a big success, and it's gotten a lot of attention in the Mexican media," says Juan Carlos Cantu Guzman, Defenders' Mexico program director. "Through efforts like this, as well as lobbying work, we will be able to protect these endangered marine species."

Today, released hatchlings swim off into the ocean. But from 1978 to 1988, biologists just let them splash in the surf before scooping them up to rear the hatchlings away from predators at a National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) lab in Galveston -- a program called Head Start. Biologists marked the turtles using "living tags," a piece of skin removed from the light underbelly and grafted onto the darker top shell, or carapace. Once the turtles reached dinner-plate size, officials released them into the Gulf—hoping that some of the tagged creatures would one day return to Padre Island to nest.

Some critics doubted the effort would work, and Congress nearly cut the program's budget in 1982. That was when Carole Allen, a stay-at-home mom from Houston, first visited the NMFS lab and learned that the program's budget was in jeopardy. She got her daughter's elementary school involved. "A HEART Council [Help Endangered Animals-Ridley Turtles] was formed and the children collected money to buy Purina Turtle Chow to feed the hatchlings," Allen explains. "No one in the country really knew anything about the Kemp's ridleys, much less anything about the program to save them or the fact that U.S. shrimpers were drowning them by the thousands." Involving schoolkids helped garner enough attention that the program got funded and renewed.

Allen has since led HEART, raising awareness and money for turtle conservation efforts. Although Kemps' ridley hatchlings drift with the currents amidst sargassum beds offshore, adults and older juveniles live mostly in near-shore Gulf of Mexico waters, where shrimping is common. Turtles get caught in the trawling nets and drown—unable to surface for breath. HEART and other conservation groups lobbied Congress to require that shrimpers use Turtle Excluder Devices (TEDs) in their nets, which allow captured turtles to escape. TEDs became mandatory in 1990, but strandings continued.

Between 1980 and 1995, more than 1,000 Kemp's ridleys stranded—injured or dead—along the Texas coast, far more than the handful that nested. The decline in the Texas shrimping industry over the past few years has decreased strandings, but trawls still present one of the greatest threats to the turtle's long-term recovery. Other perils for the animal include the potential for a major oil spill offshore, and loss of nesting beaches from global warming-caused sea level rise (see "Threats to Sea Turtles" on page 19).

Ridleys nesting in Mexico rebounded after a low of 702 nests by 280 females in 1985; today the number of nests exceeds 11,000 annually. As the population grew, a few nested in Texas, but none bore the telltale living tag. "There were many people that doubted that head-started turtles would adapt to life in the wild, and many people that did not believe experimental imprinting would work," Shaver explains. But in 1996, it happened—a head-started turtle returned to Texas. "I cried," recalls Shaver. "I looked at that tag many times to make sure I was seeing what I thought I was seeing." Since then, 14 Padre-imprinted head-start ridleys have made 29 nests in Texas.

Several thousand additional hatchlings from Rancho Nuevo nests were head-started and released in Texas from 1989 through 2000, assuming they would return to their natal beach in Mexico. Surprising everyone, at least 17 of them have nested in Texas. "I never gave up hope, even though it took 10 years from the time that I initiated the patrol program in 1986 until the first turtle from our project was found here in 1996," says Shaver. "There are many heroes in this story, true defenders of wildlife who did not give up, even when the plight of the species looked so bleak."

Volunteers and staff patrol every mile of the Padre Island National Seashore coastline from dawn until dusk from April through mid-July, looking for nesting turtles. I join one of these volunteers, retired border patrol officer Jim Hellekson, as he scouts for turtle tracks along North Padre Island. "They're a magnificent reptile," he says. The radio patches in; a nesting turtle has been spotted. By the time we reach the site, she has returned to sea. The biologists dig the nest up, bury the eggs in a sand-filled cooler, and drive the precious cargo back to the incubation facility.

The odds are stacked against hatchlings; less than 1 percent of them survive to maturity. Natural predation gets compounded by human threats such as entanglement in plastic trash, capture in nets without TEDs and fishing longlines. "We do everything we can to ensure their survival up to this point," Shaver explains. "Once we release them, they're on their own."

As Shaver helps release another set of hatchlings that evening, she reflects on the time and energy that she and others have committed to launching thousands of turtles on their maiden voyages. "It takes a tremendous amount of work to get to that point," Shaver says, "but all of the hard work is worth it when you see the hatchlings crawling down the beach and swimming away from shore carrying with them our hopes for continued increases in nesting in the future."

Texas journalist Wendee Holtcamp wrote about Louisiana black bears in the summer 2006 issue of Defenders.