Nesting turtles struggle off coast of Texas

By Mick Elmore Jun 19, 2011, 10:31 GMT

South Padre Island, Texas - Known for sun, sand, surf and raucous spring break parties, South Padre Island now seeks recognition as home to one of the world's few breeds of giant turtles, the Kemp's Ridley.

Plans to erect a sculpture of the mascot to greet visitors as they drive onto the island cannot come too soon as the big sea creatures witnessed a dramatic fall in nesting females last year.

Mayor Bob Pinkeron said they want to note the Kemp's Ridley and the part it plays for the island just north of Mexico and perhaps give the giant endangered species a bit of needed attention.

The nesting season runs from April to August with hatching mostly in June, July and August. This year people are anxious to see how many females return to the sands of Padre Island and Tamalipas, Mexico, the state just south of the island.

'In 2010 nesting fell off 40 percent,' said Jeff George the curator at Sea Turtle Inc, a non-profit dedicated to saving the turtle since 1977. George, with them since 1992, said there is not clear evidence why to numbers dropped so dramatically.

Some environmentalists have blamed the BP Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion in April 2010 and its deep sea well that gushed for three months into the Gulf of Mexico. For months, volunteers rescued, weighed, cleaned, swabbed and injected struggling Kemp's Ridleys with vitamins, fluids, antibiotics and iron.

'The turtles are affected by what we do to the oceans,' George said at Sea Turtles' little center on South Padre. He said the Kemp's Ridley feed in the upper Gulf area near the oil leak. But he made it clear there was no conclusive proof the oil spill was to blame.

Before last year 'we were saying they were well on their way to recovery and could perhaps be taken off the endangered species list in a few years,' he said.

In the 1950s as many as 100,000 female Kemp's Ridley could be found nesting, mostly in Tamaulipas.

'North Mexico is the epicenter of Kemp's Ridley nesting. To Mexico's credit all of the governments of Tamaulipas have signed on to protect the Kemp's Ridley,' George said.

They have stopped development in the nesting areas and banned fishing during the nesting season. The vast majority of nesting is in Tamaulipas with as little as 1 percent in Texas. And the Kemp's Ridley only nests in that one area mostly just south of where the Rio Grande that marks the border empties into the Gulf of Mexico.

'Ridleys don't generally leave the Gulf,' he said, unlike their giant cousins that are found in several parts of the world.

The turtles have a lot of support in South Texas with many locals helping when they can. In early February volunteers saved more than 800 sea turtles from freezing weather, the vast majority of them Kemp's Ridley.

'The community is very supportive of us,' George said.

Ila Fox Loetscher started caring for turtles in the backyard of her South Padre home in the 1950s and became know as the Turtle Lady. Others shared her concern and Sea Turtle Inc. was founded.

The center is now a popular tourists destination with more than 80,000 visiting in 2010, most attending lectures that teach how to identify turtles, how they become injured and what people can do to protect them. Visitors learn about their habitat and get a crash course in turtle care, which boils down to environmental awareness.

'Don't release your balloons, we tell them. Will it save the species? Probably not, but it might save a few more and a few more, ' he said.

Turtles mistake balloons and the more common plastic bag, as food, i.e. jellyfish. That can lead to death, a painful one at that, George said.

Brownsville, Texas, some 50 kilometres from the island, banned plastic bags last January 1, and South Padre Island plans to next January 1. Such measures will help, but stopping all plastic bag litter is delusional.

There is hope, though. The Kemp's Ridley has been on the brink before.

The number of female nesting Kemp's Ridley turtles, after dipping to about 300 in 1983-84, were rebounding and neared an estimated 14,000 in 2009. But, then came last year's shocking fall in numbers.

This year they hope to see the numbers start increasing again for what will be a slow growth out of the endangered area. It takes time, though, because females take 12 years to reach sexual maturity.

Still, George says he is optimistic. 'This species is still going to recover I think, despite the BP oil spill. But it will be 12 years before we know the full impact.'