Sea turtles further endangered
Thousands of people travel to Padre Island National Seashore at dawn every summer to cheer on sea turtle hatchlings as they are released into the surf.
It’s a huge tourist attraction for this national park on the Texas coast and a conservation success story — the result of a decadeslong effort to save the most endangered sea turtle from extinction.
But after more than 40 years of supporting the program, National Park Service officials appear to have soured on paying for it.
In a recent report, agency officials proposed sweeping changesthat scientists said would make it significantly more difficult, if not impossible, to establish a thriving population of Kemp’s ridley sea turtles on the island.
The report suggested that saving sea turtles came at the expense of other priorities, like habitat restoration and trash clean-up. It called for decreasing the number of beach patrols to find turtle nests, limiting biologists’ research to the park’s boundaries, and moving away from the practice of gathering and incubating turtle eggs in order to protect them from predators, rising tides and visitors driving on the beach.
The park’s enormously popular hatchling releases are “discretionary,” the report said, and “should be reduced.”
“I’m really shocked,” said Christopher Marshall, director of the Gulf Center for Sea Turtle Research at Texas A&M University at Galveston. If the agency’s recommendations are put in place, “there’ll be less scientific study and there’ll be less known about sea turtles in general … I do think the gains we have achieved in the last decade will be undermined.”
Lawyers with the nonprofit group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility filed a legal complaint on Wednesday with the National Park Service on behalf of one of the park’s employees, Donna Shaver, chief of the Sea Turtle Science and Recovery Program. They called for the report to be rescinded, arguing that accepting its recommendations would violate the Endangered Species Act.
Pacific PEER Director Jeff Ruch said that since the report’s publication in June, Padre Island National Seashore Superintendent Eric Brunnemann had ordered the program’s budget slashed by 30 percent. Two federal grants totaling $300,000 for research on threatened green sea turtles have already been canceled, he said. In the agency’s report, officials recommended that park staff focus almost entirely on
Kemp ridleys, ending their collection and care for green and loggerhead sea turtle eggs.
Brunnemann did not respond to questions and a park spokesman declined a request to interview Shaver.
In 1978, when the Kemp’s ridley nesting program at Padre Island began, the species was in such peril that biologists began sending them to zoos and aquariums, convinced the turtles were on the brink of extinction. Though the turtles mainly nested in Mexico, they had been so heavily poached that scientists decided to create a second colony in the U,S, to improve the species’ odds of surviving.
Throughout the ’80s, scientists worked to persuade turtles to think of Padre Island as their new home. They transported thousands of eggs from nests in Mexico to the narrow barrier island, releasing hatchlings into the Gulf of Mexico and crossing their fingers that the turtles might come back again.
The entire experiment rested on the then-controversial idea that female sea turtles would return to the beach where they were born to spawn. In 1996, the first ones did.
The Kemp’s ridley is still critically endangered, but its numbers have been growing, peaking in 2017 when beach patrollers found 353 nests in Texas.
And with that growth came national attention. The National Park Service increased the turtle conservation program’s funding in the mid-2000s and Shaver won millions of dollars in grant funding to support her work. Earlier this year, she was named a finalist for the Samuel J. Heyman Service to America Medals, better known as the “Sammies,” one of the highest honors for a federal public servant.
When the agency issued its report in June, sea turtle scientists in Texas said they were stunned by its calls for budget cuts and restrictions on research.
“It’s definitely a moneygrab,” said Jeff George, the executive director of Sea Turtle Inc, a privately run rescue center on South Padre Island. George said they had dismissed the Kemp ridley’s numbers in Texas as only a tiny fraction of the species’ overall population and downplayed the significance of the park’s conservation efforts.
“They don’t understand the realities of Texas and just how vast and remote it is. They don’t know how tenuous things were in Mexico last year and can be from year to year,” he said. “All they see is a lot of money spent for 1 percent of the population.”