Kemp's ridley sea turtles are making a comeback at Padre Island National Seashore, but these endangered turtles face a whole new generation of threats, including oil and gas development both inside and outside the park.
By Todd Wilkinson
Looking east, into the first blush of dawn, biologists and citizen volunteers drive all-terrain vehicles down the shoreline of Padre Island, Texas. They've come to find evidence of hope leading out of the Gulf of Mexico.
Every spring morning from April through early summer, the retreating tide in the Gulf of Mexico leaves behind a smooth slate of sand, upon which the remarkable recovery of Kemp's ridley sea turtles is being written.
| "We're looking for turtle tracks showing where female ridleys come ashore during the day to lay their eggs," says marine biologist Donna Shaver, who oversees the U.S. Geological Survey's Padre Island Field Research Station. "We actually see the turtles themselves at only about half the nests found. When they come on land they don't linger for very long; 45 minutes is all it takes. To see a live turtle making a nest is a big deal." |
 If you care about the future of Kemp's ridleys and the protection of special places like Padre Island National Seashore, write members of your congressional delegation telling them you oppose energy development and favor a public buyout of mineral rights modeled after the agreement brokered at Big Cypress National Preserve.
 The Kemp's ridley is one of eight species of sea turtle. Learn more about these  endangered species. | |
Never before has Shaver been more giddy and yet, more cautious about the round, olive-colored turtles. In 2002, 38 nests were documented by her team and others along the Texas coast a doubling of the previous record of 16 set in 1999 and 23 of those were found inside Padre Island National Seashore near Corpus Christi. Although less known to the public than grizzlies or bald eagles, Kemp's ridleys have a conservation story no less dramatic. "It is strange how these turtles so consistently generate emotion and evoke superlatives," wrote the late renowned marine ecologist Archie Carr. "They do astonishing things, and astonishing things happen to them."
One of the most important factors in the turtles' recovery has been the work volunteers have dedicated to these astonishing creatures. Citizens, says Padre Island's Superintendent Jock Whitworth, are part of the stewardship game plan. Each spring, about 100 volunteers ranging in age from 18 to 70 patrol the beaches. "Not only does it provide extra sets of eyes for limited staff, but it has given residents of the Corpus Christi area a sense of buy-in," Shaver says. "People here look upon Kemp's ridleys as their turtles. They're proud to have a role in their recovery."
This public interest, officials say, has been the impetus for conservation. Without continued federal funding for scientific research and turtle management, experts say turtle recovery would never have happened. With this support, Padre Island has received funding for a new turtle laboratory that will open in 2004 as well as about $95,000 through the Natural Resource Challenge, to be used for turtle monitoring. Today, the national seashore, which encompasses a 68-mile-long barrier island, offers the best stretch of protected Kemp's ridley nesting habitat in the United States.
The object of all this interest, the Kemp's ridley (Lepidochelys kempii), is the smallest and most endangered sea turtle in the world.
Against long odds, young turtles hatch in the same sandy nurseries known to their ancestors, then crawl into the surf and spend a decade navigating thousands of miles in the open ocean through a gauntlet of dangers. Although the turtles' growing years remain largely a mystery, once they achieve adulthood, female turtles somehow find their way back to their birthplace to lay eggs, setting the stage for another generation.
The turtles' evolutionary history is a true epic, though only in the 20th century did their amazing journey appear headed for an abrupt end. Nothing better illustrates their decline than what happened at Rancho Nuevo, Mexico, home to the largest and most robust Kemp's ridley population in the world.
From an estimated 40,000 nesting females in that area in the late 1940s, fewer than 600 were recorded 40 years later. As the turtles declined dramatically there, primarily a result of commercial fishing in the gulf and poaching of the eggs, Kemp's ridleys nearly vanished from the northern extent of their nesting range along the Texas coast.
To halt further declines, the governments of Mexico and the United States launched an aggressive turtle protection campaign two decades ago that had twin objectives: saving the Rancho Nuevo colony and embarking upon an unprecedented attempt to re-establish a second viable nesting population at Padre Island National Seashore. The Texas effort was intended to serve as an insurance policy in the event of a catastrophe, such as a hurricane, outbreak of disease, or oil spill.
From the beginning, a major challenge at Padre Island was figuring out how to instill in hatchlings the legendary homing instinct that sea turtles possess. Scientists believe the instinct has to do with a sense-based memory, as complicated as the guiding system that steers salmon and migratory birds.
Between 1978 and 1988, 22,507 eggs from the Rancho Nuevo colony were collected, packed in Padre Island sand, and taken to south Texas for incubation. When the turtles hatched, they were allowed to crawl down the Padre Island beach to the water's edge, then were netted and taken to a National Marine Fisheries Service Lab in Galveston for several months until they were large enough to evade most predators. They were turned loose on the beach after being tagged for future identification.
Year after year, over several spring seasons, biologists and park visitors prowled the shore looking for signs. Then in 1996, two adult female turtles one tagged as a youngster in 1983, the other in 1986 emerged from the Gulf of Mexico and laid 176 eggs.
"It was a really emotional experience," Shaver says, recalling that many of her staff had tears in their eyes as they witnessed the homecoming. "This was a pivotal point. To see it happen during my working career has been tremendously rewarding."
Both on Padre Island and at Rancho Nuevo, turtle numbers have increased nearly every year since then. But before the species' status can be upgraded from endangered to threatened, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and National Marine Fisheries Service say that at least 10,000 females must nest in a season worldwide over a couple of years running. Shaver believes the threshold may be reached within two decades, provided the upward trend continues, but she remains cautious. Until the Padre Island population reaches much higher levels, human-enhanced incubation of eggs collected from the seashore will continue.
Under the best of circumstances, one in about 100 eggs produces a turtle that survives to adulthood, but the rate of survival can plunge to one in 1,000. In the wild, turtle eggs and hatchlings are vulnerable to a host of predators, including ghost crabs, raccoons, coyotes, fire ants, and people.
And those are just some of the challenges. Even when a young turtle manages to reach the ocean, it must then skirt commercial fishing fleets beyond the jurisdiction of the Park Service. To assist with the turtle's survival, the National Marine Fisheries Service mandated in the 1990s that all shrimp boats plying gulf waters which had caught and killed untold numbers of Kemp's ridleys over the years add Turtle Exclusion Devices (TEDs) to their nets. The TEDs are designed to allow most turtles to escape the net webbing that often entangles and drowns them.
Then, in 2000, the state of Texas closed the near coastline to shrimping between December and June, a move intended to help sustain the shrimp fishery but also to reduce the number of ridleys caught in nets. Both measures produced obvious dividends, yet indications persist that they may not be enough.
"Shrimpers will tell you they never catch turtles, but an awful lot of adult Kemps are turning up dead at the beginning of the summer shrimping season," says retired U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist Johnny French, who spent a quarter of a century monitoring marine ecosystems along the gulf.
Adds Padre Island Superintendent Whitworth in a sobering admission: "I don't see this population being out of the woods yet. We're still seeing dead turtles wash up far in excess of the number of productive nests on the beach."
In addition, the turtles are facing an emerging threat from oil and natural gas development, both near the nesting beaches and offshore. With the Bush administration giving the green light to increased domestic oil and gas production, conservationists fear the results could be disastrous. Already, the federal government has signaled energy developers that even parks will be open to drilling. At least 700 wells have been drilled in 13 different units of the National Park System, and more are proposed. And Padre Island presents one of the best illustrations of what is at stake should something go wrong because of proposals on the table from BNP Petroleum Corporation. The company has drilled one natural gas well within the park, bringing truck traffic along 15 miles of the gulf beach. BNP intends to drill several more wells at the seashore.
"The public is largely unaware of the wholesale assault that's occurring on Padre Island," says Randall Rasmussen, acting director of NPCA's Southwest regional office, noting that the conflict dates back to 1962, when Padre Island National Seashore was created by an act of Congress. In circumscribing the seashore's protected boundaries, the federal government saw no need to buy the subsurface mineral development rights inside the preserve then owned by private companies and the state of Texas. Failure to secure those rights, Rasmussen says, has proved to be a terrible mistake that today can be remedied only by vigilant opposition from citizens and a public buyout of mineral rights.
Additional wells would mean dozens of trucks making trips along the shoreline, with the potential for crushing turtles and buried eggs. The trucks also leave deep ruts in the sand that hatchlings cannot cross. The park is taking precautions. The park employs biologists trained by U.S. Geological Survey and the Park Service to patrol the beach looking for turtles, tracks, and nests, and when nests are found, to transport them to an incubation facility at park headquarters. Even though the Park Service and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service require restrictions, including a 15-mile-per-hour limit on traffic year-round and monitors who accompany all large trucks down the beach during nesting season, NPCA and a coalition of conservation groups representing millions of citizens have vowed to challenge any drilling. BNP says it is sending its employees to "turtle school" to sensitize them to the needs of Kemp's ridleys, but critics say that is comparable to asking bowlers to be quiet next to the National Cathedral.
In 2002, the Bush administration pledged $235 million to buy out private mineral rights in Big Cypress National Preserve in Florida, but has not made a similar move to benefit Padre Island, which is in the president's home state.
"This is not about decreasing our nation's dependence on foreign sources of energy, since natural gas is something the United States does not import," Rasmussen says. "The real picture is that Padre Island and its marine life are being sacrificed to fuel the greed of corporate energy developers."
If the administration truly wants to consider the issue of scarcity, he adds, it doesn't lie with energy commodities. To see the miracle of a turtle returning from its epic sea odyssey puts the notion of rareness into fresh light. Still, the question remains: How will Americans choose to honor the homecoming of these remarkable, odds-defying creatures? Will it be with industrial development in one of their last sanctuaries, or with the seashore's nurturing peace and quiet?
