Where I shamelessly defer to the experts, just listen to the podcast from the folks at seaturtle.org and their blog, twist (this week in sea turtles).
This Week in Sea Turtles
Meanwhile, in the great turtle race, my pick billie’s back in first, chased by the Stephen Colburtle…
It’s travel all the time for sea turtles. Of course, the great turtle race is finally on, and windy’s in the lead, my pick billie’s in second place, a mere 30 miles behind. There’s a new turtle in the race, Colbertia, named in honor of Stephen Colbert, in third place.
Anything that gets turtles some attention is good.
But this is only a 500 mile sprint. PBS’ nature series had a one hour documentary on an 8000 mile, one plus year journey of a loggerhead turtle from her juvenile feeding grounds in Mexico to her adult breeding ground in Japan. It’s great to spend an hour at that close proximity to a turtle. But to me, the other animals, the dolphin pods, the giant fish swarms, the hammerhead sharks, the other sharks, the jelly fish, those little fish that eat parasites off the turtles and sharks kinda stole the show. There is something about thousands of animals of the same species doing something in concert.
Anyway, nothing more to say, except that 8000 miles is a long way at a mile an hour. I don’t think any of us can appreciate the mindfulness and sense of purpose (do turtles have these qualities, or do they just keep on chuggin’?), not to mention the huge amount of luck it takes to get it done.
I have written about turtle excluder devices (TEDs) and how they save adult turtles lives previously. So, this story is an utterly avoidable tragedy brought about by the lack of implementation of laws regulating the use of TEDs.
The death of hundreds of Olive Ridley turtles along the Paravada coast in December 2007 had occurred due to failure of the trawlers to install the mandatory turtle excluder device. Lab tests conducted at Andhra University and Veterinary Biological Research Institute, Hyderabad ruled out the largescale death of the endangered species due to consumption of toxic contents discharged by industries located nearby or on account of rise in the seawater temperature.“We didn’t find any abnormal pollution levels. The washing ashore of carcasses was not a localised phenomena as dead turtles were found all along the coast up to Srikakulam during the year-end – the breeding season,” P.J. Vijaykar, Divisional Forest Officer told The Hindu on Wednesday.
The Hindu : Andhra Pradesh / Visakhapatnam News : Olive Ridley death riddle solved
Andhra Pradesh was supposed to be a success story with the TEDs. This from an article by Kartik Shanker, one of SSTCN’s founding members…
In India, the parallel cases of Orissa and Andhra Pradesh demonstrate how a TED programme should not (and should) be implemented. In Orissa, the polarization between the fishing community and conservationists has prevented the introduction of TEDs, while in Andhra Pradesh, TEDs were introduced by the state Fisheries Department with appropriate demonstration and training programmes (see Shanker and Pilcher, 2003).
So, this occurrence in Andhra Pradesh is quite disheartening and speaks to the large gaps that lie between legislation, policy and implementation in India.
Cross Posted at SSTCN
Tags: OliveRidley, Sea Turtles, SSTCN
Following up on the fishing issues from last week, here’s word that lights used to lure tuna towards longline fisheries attract juvenile sea turtles as well.
Article – Science & Technology – Lightsticks may hold deadly attraction for sea turtles
RALEIGH, N.C. Longline fishermen use lightsticks similar to the glowing tubes that delight trick-or-treaters to lure tuna and swordfish to baited hooks. New research by University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill scientists suggests that for endangered sea turtles the lights may hold a fatal attraction.
Lab experiments by Ken Lohmann, a University of North Carolina biology professor and John Wang, a graduate who is now a research associate at the University of Hawaii and National Marine Fisheries, found that young loggerhead turtles in a tank tended to swim toward lights.
It’s well known that hatchling turtles on a beach will crawl toward lights as they try to find the surf. But researchers did not know whether juvenile loggerheads in the water shared that attraction. Young loggerhead and leatherback sea turtles, which are protected because of declining numbers, are inadvertently hooked during longline fishing.
Well, not so surprising, is it? Bioluminescence is a common enough phenomenon that especially at night, animals will be attracted to light as it can signal food. It’s tricky, but when you try to catch fish, tyou will catch other animals as well. So, when you change something about the way you catch fish, you need to study how it affects other endangered species…
Off topic, but it is ironic that I read this in the ocregister, which is a newspaper from Orange County, California. It reported on work done by UNC Chapel Hill, which is in Orange County, North Carolina.
I grew up in Chennai and worked with the Students’ Sea Turtle Conservation Network in the mid ’90s. It’s nice to see an article on them in the city’s biggest newspaper.
The Hindu : Tamil Nadu / Chennai News : Olive Ridley hatchlings go home
CHENNAI: Scores of newborn Olive Ridley turtles entered their natural habitat — the sea — under the watchful eyes of conservationists at Elliots Beach, Besant Nagar, here early on Sunday. Conservationists said nearly 75 eggs hatched on Sunday alone and most of the young ones were safely released into the waters. But about 25 eggs reportedly did not hatch and some were stillborn. Volunteers of the Students Sea Turtle Conservation Network (SSTCN) annually collect Olive Ridley turtle eggs from the Besant Nagar coastline upto Neelankarai, a fishing village beyond Tiruvanmiyur. The eggs are then taken to a hatchery at Oorurkuppam, a fishing village located behind the Theosophical Society premises. It takes 45 days for the young ones to hatch.
In Chennai, and most of South India, the adult sea turtles are not poached, only the eggs. Also, it is not possible to just secure the nest with “do not poach” notice! So the eggs need to be relocated to a hatchery where they’re re-buried. For more on sea turtle “management” in India, I would suggest visiting Kartik Shanker’s excellent website.
Students’ Sea Turtle Conservation Network
The organization that started my interest in Environmental issues is finally online at their fledgling website, http://www.sstcn.org. It is a proud moment!
Blogged with Flock
Tags: oliveridley, chennai, sea turtles, conservation
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.