Headcount of Sea Turtles Proves Elusive
source: http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2010/07/headcount-of-sea-turtles-proves-.html
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"Government agencies don't have the data they need to accurately count populations of the six species of endangered and threatened sea turtles in the United States, says a report issued today by the National Research Council. And that will throw a wrench into ongoing efforts to figure out how badly the turtle populations that live and nest in the Gulf of Mexico have been hit by the oil spill, says report chair Karen Bjorndal, a marine biologist at the University of Florida in Gainesville who studies loggerhead and green turtles. The data gaps also hamper the government's ability to set sensible, "acceptable take" limits, the numbers of turtles deemed permissible for fishermen to accidentally catch, she says.
A first, rough estimate of the oil spill's impact will emerge when government scientists count nests next year, says a report author, Larry Crowder, a marine biologist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. But if the government sticks to that method alone, they won't know the fate of this year's endangered Kemp's ridley hatchlings, which seek out floating seaweed patches in the gulf after leaving their nests in Mexico, until those hatchlings mature, up to 15 years later. "Something like a Kemp's ridley has to live for a dozen years before it becomes a statistic," he says.
"If [government agencies] had the kind of data that we tell them they should obtain, we'd be in a much better position to judge the impacts on the sea turtles in the Gulf of Mexico and the repercussions down the line," says Bjorndal."
http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2010/07/headcount-of-sea-turtles-prove...
A first, rough estimate of the oil spill's impact will emerge when government scientists count nests next year, says a report author, Larry Crowder, a marine biologist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. But if the government sticks to that method alone, they won't know the fate of this year's endangered Kemp's ridley hatchlings, which seek out floating seaweed patches in the gulf after leaving their nests in Mexico, until those hatchlings mature, up to 15 years later. "Something like a Kemp's ridley has to live for a dozen years before it becomes a statistic," he says.
"If [government agencies] had the kind of data that we tell them they should obtain, we'd be in a much better position to judge the impacts on the sea turtles in the Gulf of Mexico and the repercussions down the line," says Bjorndal."
http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2010/07/headcount-of-sea-turtles-prove...
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