Tuesdays with Turtles – Outback Edition

I mentioned recently that elevated temperatures from climate could skew sea turtle sex ratios towards females. The featured news article highlights research which speculates that storm surges caused by increased hurricane (they call them cyclones in Austraila and India) intensity from climate change might lead to the flooding of green turtle nests in Florida, hastening their extinction. Why only the greens? Because they nest later than the other turtles and tend to be around during the height of the Atlantic hurricane season.

We know from previous research that loggerhead turtles have been nesting earlier because of elevated temperatures. Will the greens catch up. More pertinently, will there be enough survival of the early nesters of this generation to keep a viable population going while the whole population adapts? As with all climate change suspense thrillers, only time will tell… Depressing, at any rate.

News in Science – Cyclones may blast turtles to extinction – 15/05/2007

More severe tropical cyclones expected as a result of climate change may lead to the extinction of the green sea turtle in some areas within 100 years, researchers say.

The cyclones are expected to threaten how well the turtles nest and hatch eggs, placing pressure on already endangered populations, some of which are also threatened by fish trawling.

Researchers including PhD candidate David Pike, from the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Sydney, report their findings online in the journal Oecologia.

The researchers studied more than 40,000 sea turtles nests on an uninhabited, 38 kilometre stretch of beach along the Atlantic coast of Florida from 1995 to the end of 2005.

Each night during this period researchers surveyed the beach for turtles emerging to lay eggs, or for tracks of turtles that had already deposited eggs.

The stretch of beach is home to the loggerhead, green, and leatherback sea turtles, which start nesting at the beginning in April and end in late September.

This nesting season largely coincides with region’s tropical storm season, which runs from June to November.

Leatherback turtles (Dermochelys coriacea) and, to a lesser degree, loggerhead turtles (Caretta caretta) get around this by nesting and hatching earlier.

Only nests laid late in the season are inundated with seawater during storm surges.

But green turtles (Chelonia mydas) nest last.

Their entire nesting season occurs during Florida’s tropical cyclone season, which means their nests and developing eggs are extremely vulnerable to being washed away and killed.

Researchers are concerned that increases in the severity of tropical cyclones in the future may cause green turtle nesting success to worsen.

In case I forgot to mention, the Olive Ridley arribada started during the 2nd week of February, so about 50 days later, here they are, the “millions” of hatchlings.

The Hindu News Update Service

Olive Ridley hatchlings emerge in Gahirmatha

Kendrapara (Orissa), April 10. (PTI): Millions of tiny olive ridley sea turtle hatchlings are now emerging out of nests at the Gahirmatha beach in Orissa’s Kendrapara district, wildlife officials said on Monday.

The eggs laid by thousands of adult females in the Nasi-2 and Babubali islands in the Gahirmatha marine sanctuary have began to hatch over the last two days, they said.

Wildlife officials stationed at the nesting grounds were witness to the phenomenon, but tourists and researchers were not allowed into the unmanned territory close to the Wheeler’s island where a defence test range is located.

India’s intermediate range nuclear-capable missile Agni III is likely to be test fired from there some time this week, defence sources said.

You know what, the fact that this area is under close military supervision because of India’s grandiose missile dreams may not be sucha bad thing (sacrilege!!!). The area is under so much development pressure that even military operations are better than the alternative.

For more about the Gahirmatha area, visit the official website. At this point in time, the Arribada is very tourist unfriendly, and there are few, if any volunteering opportunities. I will keep any eye open for changes

Technorati Tags: olive ridley, sea turtles

An interesting paper featuring a North Carolinian turtle researcher Larry Crowder from Duke University:

Blackwell Synergy – Conservation Biology, Volume 21 Issue 1 Page 79 – February 2007 (Full Text)

Abstract: Although some sea turtle populations are showing encouraging signs of recovery, others continue to decline. Reversing population declines requires an understanding of the primary factor(s) that underlie this persistent demographic trend. The list of putative factors includes direct turtle and egg harvest, egg predation, loss or degradation of nesting beach habitat, fisheries bycatch, pollution, and large-scale changes in oceanographic conditions and nutrient availability. Recently, fisheries bycatch, in particular bycatch from longline fisheries, has received increased attention and has been proposed as a primary source of turtle mortality. We reviewed the existing data on the relative impact of longline bycatch on sea turtle populations. Although bycatch rates from individual longline vessels are extremely low, the amount of gear deployed by longline vessels suggests that cumulative bycatch of turtles from older age classes is substantial. Current estimates suggest that even if pelagic longlines are not the largest single source of fisheries-related mortality, longline bycatch is high enough to warrant management actions in all fleets that encounter sea turtles. Nevertheless, preliminary data also suggest that bycatch from gillnets and trawl fisheries is equally high or higher than longline bycatch with far higher mortality rates. Until gillnet and trawl fisheries are subject to the same level of scrutiny given to pelagic longlines, our understanding of the overall impact of fisheries bycatch on vulnerable sea turtle populations will be incomplete

Adult sea turtle killing by humans occurs due to

1. Harvest, killing them deliberately for food
2. Incidental bycatch in fishing nets
3. Habitat loss

The paper focuses on long line fishing and its effects on turtle mortality. So, if like me, you’re not a fisherperson, what is long line fishing and what are some other kinds of fishing techniques that have effects of sea turtles? Well, the Duke Project GloBal research team on studying bycatch has a nice primer. Some highlights:

1. Longlines: As the word suggests, longlines are very long (>10 km) lines of 2000+ individually baited hooks that drift close to the surface and are used to catch tuna, swordfish, halibut, etc. Crowder’s paper suggests that while each individual longline hook has low probability of catching a turtle, because of their number and ubiquitousness, they catch many many turtles.
2. Gillnets: These are giant rectangular mesh nets, either stationary or drifting, that catch marine life indiscriminately. There’s not much that can be done by way of reducingsea turtle catch in gillnets, except monitoring, observation and just using less of them
3. Trawls: Big funnel shaped bags that catch fish. Bottom trawling fishing boats used to, and still catch turtles at an alarming rate. Trawls are now (at least in the U.S and other “developed” countries) required to be outfitted with Turtle Excluder Devices (TEDS) to let turtles swim to safety.
4. Purse Seines: These are weighted on the bottom and float at the corners. They are indiscriminate, and especially hard on dolphins. It appears that mitigation efforts aimed at reducing dolphin mortality have the unintended effect of increasing sea turtle catch. Battle of the cute species!!

Take home message? Catching fish causes a lot of turtles to die. While trawl fishing is the worst culprit, it is also the most studied and the technique for which a viable mitigation strategy exists. THe other kinds of fishing are less studied, and there is precious little that can be done to avoid sea turtle bycatch.

Happy fishing!

This is almost a 1000 juveniles killed in a year in Baja California alone. The authors mention that over 99% of all fisherpeople are employed in small scale fisheries, which surprised me.

PLoS ONE: Small-Scale Fisheries Bycatch Jeopardizes Endangered Pacific Loggerhead Turtles:

Although bycatch of industrial-scale fisheries can cause declines in migratory megafauna including seabirds, marine mammals, and sea turtles, the impacts of small-scale fisheries have been largely overlooked. Small-scale fisheries occur in coastal waters worldwide, employing over 99% of the world’s 51 million fishers. New telemetry data reveal that migratory megafauna frequent coastal habitats well within the range of small-scale fisheries, potentially producing high bycatch. These fisheries occur primarily in developing nations, and their documentation and management are limited or non-existent, precluding evaluation of their impacts on non-target megafauna.

This is a surprising and unexpected finding because you would expect smaller fishing boats to have smaller impacts. I guess smaller scale fishing fleets in Mexico (and other developing nations) have not been targeted for education, awareness and enforcement of turtle safe fishing practices.

The good news from the study is that a major source of mortality has been identified and the authors point to recent efforts to increase awareness in the community about turtle safe fishing. But it will be a long and hard fight to be tackled all over the world.