Season’s first Kemp’s turtle nest spotted
GALVESTON — Two college students on Thursday discovered the first eggs this nesting season laid by an endangered Kemp’s ridley sea turtle on the upper Texas Gulf Coast.
The nest was found at about 11:45 a.m. by two students from Texas A&M University at Corpus Christi who were vacationing at Surfside in Brazoria County, said Christopher Marshall, who heads turtle research at Texas A&M University at Galveston.
The turtle eggs will be placed in special crates and shipped to Padre Island National Seashore for incubation.
The lower Texas Gulf Coast — generally everything south of Quintana Beach in Brazoria County — typically has many more nests because the area is closer to the main nesting area in Tamaulipas State, Mexico, not far from the U.S. border.
Texas is the only state on the Gulf Coast where Kemp’s ridleys, the official Texas sea turtle, make a significant number of nests.
At least 97 nests have been discovered so far this year on the lower coast, most of them on Padre Island.
About 45 percent of nests are discovered by visitors, but the rest are found by turtle patrol volunteers who begin walking the beaches every day at 7 a.m., said Joanie Steinhaus, head of the Turtle Island Restoration Network office in Galveston.
For the last two years, volunteers have struggled to find enough money to finance patrols that protect the Kemp’s ridley during its nesting season.
The dry spell for patrols ended this year thanks to money provided by BP as part of its criminal settlement to restore the environmental damage caused by the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill.
Texas received $45 million last year that was parceled to organizations and governments along the Texas Gulf Coast as part of the Natural Resource Damage Assessment. A small chunk of the money went to the two organizations that cooperatively run the turtle patrols: Texas A&M University at Galveston and the Turtle Island Restoration Network.
Turtle Island received $50,000 a year for the next two years, Steinhaus said. “But that’s only a small portion of what it will take to help the Kemp’s ridley sea turtles recover from the impacts of the (Deepwater Horizon) oil spill and other threats,” Steinhaus said.
The amount received by Texas A&M was not immediately available, but it also received money for two years, Marshall said.
Texas A&M used its share to purchase and maintain six utility task vehicles to patrol stretches of beach that are too wide for foot patrols, Marshall said. The new vehicles allow for the patrolling of 72 miles of beach, from Freeport to High Island.
Turtle Island, which coordinates the patrols, used its money to nearly double the number of walking routes from six to 11, Steinhaus said.
Once the eggs are sent to the nursery on Padre Island, they have a 95 percent chance of hatching. Without the patrols, eggs could be eaten by predators, crushed by vehicles or raided by vandals.
The money for the patrols is especially important as scientists seek to reverse a dramatic decline in the number of Kemp’s ridley nests, which some studies suggest were directly related to the BP oil spill.
Kemp’s ridleys, on the verge of extinction in the 1980s, had made such a strong comeback before the spill that the U.S. government was on the verge of taking it off the endangered species list.
The number of nests has fallen dramatically since then, and a study presented in 2014 by then-Texas A&M Galveston researcher Kimberly Reich found oil in the shells of turtles that swam through the spill. BP denies that the oil spill is responsible for the decline of the turtles or any other species.
Anyone spotting a nesting turtle should call the turtle hotline at 866-turtle5.