"Night of the Turtle People"

[amborin]

(snip for copyright purposes-proud patriot moderator Democratic Underground)


THE CRAWL Loggerhead turtle hatchlings follow a volunteer-made trench to the water.


NIGHT OPS “Turtle people” in Gulf Shores, Ala., chaperon BP cleanup crews in turtle nesting grounds.



The BP-Spill Baby-Turtle Brigade

Loggerhead nesting season started this year, as usual, in May. Across the northeastern coast of the Gulf of Mexico, female sea turtles began plodding out of the water and up the beach, each burying a clutch of a hundred or more leathery eggs beneath the sand. The eggs incubate for about 60 days. Then a throng of tiny black loggerhead hatchlings, each only about two inches long, frantically boils out of the ground, all paddling clumsily with their outsize, winglike flippers. They scuttle down the beach en masse, capitalizing on a one-time frenzy of energy to rush into the water and push past the breakers into offshore currents. Once they make it there — if they make it there — they typically find their way onto mats of seaweed called sargassum. The hatchlings will drift passively around the ocean on this sargassum for the first several years of their lives, like children inner-tubing in a swimming pool. It’s a life raft from which, conveniently, they can also pluck snacks. Many turtles wind up gliding around the Florida peninsula and floating as far out as the Azores during a developmental stage biologists call “the lost years.”

The hatchlings from this season’s first nests, however, were on schedule to scramble into the Gulf of Mexico only a few months after the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon rig, at what looked to be the height of one of the worst man-made environmental disasters in history. By June, the sargassum in that part of the gulf was heavily oiled. Soon, it appeared to be largely gone: incinerated in controlled burns, maybe, or hauled up by skimmer boats.

And so state and federal wildlife agencies came up with a radical plan. Sea-turtle eggs laid on beaches in Alabama and the Florida Panhandle would be dug up during their very last days of incubation, packed into Styrofoam coolers and shipped to a climate-controlled warehouse at the Kennedy Space Center on the opposite coast of Florida. There, after hatching, the baby turtles would be released into the oil-free Atlantic. When I arrived in Alabama in late July, tens of thousands of turtle eggs, from hundreds of nests, were already in the proc­ess of being relocated — all during a point in their development when even a slight jolt to the egg could be lethal. In short, America was orchestrating the migration of an entire generation of sea turtles, slow and steady, overland, in a specially outfitted FedEx truck.

Fortunately, a vast and well-organized infrastructure of volunteers was already in place: people who, for years, happened to have been honing some of the very skills that the survival of these imperiled animals suddenly hinged on — not because they saw such a crisis coming, but basically because they really loved turtles.

(snip)
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http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/03/magazine/03turtles-t.html?hpw

[tavalon]

1. So I wonder if any of these turtles will make it and where they will imprint to return to

[AwakeAtLast]

2. This is great to read, however

from the title I thought it was going to be about Mitch McConnell's family. :evilgrin:

[4_TN_TITANS]

4. I also expected something about McConnell...

too much Stephanie Miller, I guess. :P

[YOY]

3. We come...slowly...

n.t.