By JON MOOALLEM
Loggerhead nesting season started this year, as usual, in May. Across the northeastern coast of the Gulf of Mexico, female sea turtles began plodding out of the water and up the beach, each burying a clutch of a hundred or more leathery eggs beneath the sand. The eggs incubate for about 60 days. Then a throng of tiny black loggerhead hatchlings, each only about two inches long, frantically boils out of the ground, all paddling clumsily with their outsize, winglike flippers. They scuttle down the beach en masse, capitalizing on a one-time frenzy of energy to rush into the water and push past the breakers into offshore currents. Once they make it there — if they make it there — they typically find their way onto mats of seaweed called sargassum. The hatchlings will drift passively around the ocean on this sargassum for the first several years of their lives, like children inner-tubing in a swimming pool. It’s a life raft from which, conveniently, they can also pluck snacks. Many turtles wind up gliding around the Florida peninsula and floating as far out as the Azores during a developmental stage biologists call “the lost years.”
The hatchlings from this season’s first nests, however, were on schedule to scramble into the Gulf of Mexico only a few months after the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon rig, at what looked to be the height of one of the worst man-made environmental disasters in history. By June, the sargassum in that part of the gulf was heavily oiled. Soon, it appeared to be largely gone: incinerated in controlled burns, maybe, or hauled up by skimmer boats. And so state and federal wildlife agencies came up with a radical plan. Sea-turtle eggs laid on beaches in Alabama and the Florida Panhandle would be dug up during their very last days of incubation, packed into Styrofoam coolers and shipped to a climate-controlled warehouse at the Kennedy Space Center on the opposite coast of Florida. There, after hatching, the baby turtles would be released into the oil-free Atlantic. When I arrived in Alabama in late July, tens of thousands of turtle eggs, from hundreds of nests, were already in the process of being relocated — all during a point in their development when even a slight jolt to the egg could be lethal. In short, America was orchestrating the migration of an entire generation of sea turtles, slow and steady, overland, in a specially outfitted FedEx truck.
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The five species of sea turtle that nest on American beaches, including the loggerhead, are listed as either “threatened” or “endangered” under the Endangered Species Act. And so, all summer, wherever the turtles come ashore — along the Gulf Coast, around Florida and up through the Carolinas — volunteers like the Gormleys help wildlife agencies patrol the beaches, looking to cordon off and protect any new nests. Finding the nests isn’t easy. After laying the eggs in a hole in the sand in the middle of the night, the female loggerhead fills it and sloshes around to camouflage it. The tracks a female leaves, as it goes back and forth from the water, are called a turtle crawl, and the crawl is usually the only conspicuous evidence that a creature weighing several hundred pounds has even been there. Volunteers have to get on the beach first thing every morning before any new crawls are obscured by tourists’ footprints, or beach chairs or college students dragging coolers of Budweiser up and down the sand (which, maddeningly, leave trails that look a lot like loggerhead crawls). This summer, on the Gulf Coast, the volunteers were also having to contend with the obliterating tracks of BP’s cleanup crews: the brigades of ATVs and tractors, which liked to get an early start.
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The turtle-egg evacuation was devised jointly by Fish and Wildlife, the National Marine Fisheries Service of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (F.W.C.). These agencies immediately understood that their plan depended on the presence and participation of turtle people. “I don’t see how we could have done it without them,” says Robbin Trindell, a top sea-turtle biologist with the F.W.C. For one thing, they couldn’t have moved any nests if turtle people hadn’t already been out there on the beach locating and marking them. Fish and Wildlife’s national sea-turtle coordinator, Sandy MacPherson, told me: “We totally rely on those groups every year. This year, we are asking them to go above and beyond what they normally do, which is already above and beyond.”
moreFascinating story.
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