A whole generation of Loggerhead turtles, a species that is already considered “threatened,” would very likely have been lost with out the massive rescue effort that began this week to relocate almost 70,000 turtle eggs to safe quarters. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service will coordinate the plan to evacuate up to 800 turtle nests buried in the sand across Florida Panhandle and Alabama beaches.
It’s never been done on this scale before, but experts say there is no other choice.
“This is an extraordinary effort under extraordinary conditions, but if we can save some of the hatchlings, it will be worth it as opposed to losing all of them,” Chuck Underwood of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service told the AP.
“We have a much higher degree of certainty that if we do nothing and we allow these turtles to emerge and go into the Gulf and into the oil … that we could in fact lose most of them, if not all of them,” he added. “There’s a chance of losing a whole generation.”
The turtle eggs will be painstakingly dug out of the sand, mostly by hand, and placed specially designed Styrofoam containers, like coolers, along with sand and moisture to replicate a natural nest. The containers will be kept in a temperature controlled warehouse at Florida’s Kennedy Space Center. When the hatchlings emerge, they will be placed one by one on Florida’s east coast, where the turtle can enter the Atlantic without the threat of oil.
Most of the time, conservationists don’t support relocating turtle nests, but in this situation a rare consensus has arisen among government workers and conservationists. This massive effort is the best, and only, hope for this generation of Loggerheads.
“We’re talking about allowing the entire year’s class of hatchlings to emerge and swim to their certain doom, and are we just going to sit back and let that happen?” David Godfrey, executive director of the Gainesville, Florida based Sea Turtle Conservancy told the AP. ”We just can’t.”
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