tagged w/ Endangered Sea Turtles
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CNN...
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U.S. beefs up conservation efforts for endangered sea turtles
By Shelby Lin Erdman, CNN Radio
September 18, 2011 8:03 p.m. EDT
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PHOTO: Loggerhead turtles will be divided into nine distinct population groups based on where they live, according to new regulations.
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(CNN) -- The government has revised its rules on sea turtles to try to decrease the number killed every year and reduce the threats they face.
The new regulations place the Loggerhead turtle into nine distinct population groups, depending on where they live, instead of listing the marine animal as a single worldwide species. In all nine segments the turtles are listed as either threatened or endangered.
Officials at both the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, both responsible for overseeing the turtle conservation efforts, say they can better address the challenges the turtles face with the new geographical division.
Loggerhead or marine turtles live in tropical and subtropical waters around the world. The new "distinct population segments" for the turtles are: The Northeast Atlantic Ocean group, the Mediterranean Sea, the North Indian Ocean, the North Pacific Ocean, the South Pacific Ocean, the Northwest Atlantic, which includes the Gulf of Mexico and our Atlantic Coast, the South Atlantic Ocean, the Southeast Indo-Pacific Ocean and the Southwest Indian Ocean.
Researchers estimate more than 4,500 loggerheads are killed every year by commercial fishing, but environmentalists believe the number is probably much higher.
Commercial fishing is one of the biggest risks for the turtles, whether they live in the Indian, Pacific or Atlantic oceans, said Jim Lecky, the fisheries director for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
"They all continue to be challenged by a number of threats, incidental capture in fishing gear, longlines, gill nets, trawl gear, trap and pot lines, which tangle turtles and other species, and dredges; all have incidental mortality of sea turtles in those fisheries," he said.
But Lecky says that's not the only threat for the turtles. "They are all also challenged by losses of habitat, degradation of nesting habitat. There still is direct harvest of eggs in adults ... at some level and they are all subject to vessel strikes."
The turtles are facing all those threats, but at different levels. So the new rules will allow fine-tuning of sea turtle conservation measures and regulations.
"We believe that this revised listing of the Loggerhead will help us and our partners to better focus recovery and conservation efforts by allowing us to take a more regional approach. But, again, the separation of Loggerhead into these population groups will not reduce our current conservation efforts," said Sandy MacPherson, the national sea turtle coordinator for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
MacPherson also told CNN Radio, "These new listings will help us to provide more focused recovery and conservation, as well as more focused threat analysis and evaluation of conservation successes."
The Center for Biological Diversity said in a statement that Loggerhead populations "need more protection to survive this century."
The rule revisions also included designating five regional populations as endangered species, which the group characterized as "a wake-up call that a whole host of threats, from oil spills, channel dredging and commercial trawling to longline and gillnet fisheries, continue to kill off turtles faster than the animals can possibly hope to reproduce."
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CNN's Ninette Sosa and Barbara Hall both contributed to this report.CNN...
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U.S. beefs up conservation efforts for endangered sea turtles
By... more
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Here is a link to my friend's YouTube website. Marc Ward is an authorized Marine Turtle Investigator who has spent many, many days trying to save sea turtles from extinction. The Sea Turtles Forever site on YouTube documents some of the organization's work, which includes collecting and analyzing tons of plastic debris that has washed ashore on the west coast of North America and Central America. Please visit this link and send it to all of your friends so that we might raise awareness and work together to save marine animals from death by plastic.
http://www.youtube.com/user/seaturtlesforeverHere is a link to my friend's YouTube website. Marc Ward is an authorized Marine... more
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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-proves-.html"Government agencies don't have the data they need to accurately count... more
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GETTY IMAGES
A worker uses a shovel to remove an oil glob from the beach Thursday, July 1, in Biloxi, Mississippi.GETTY IMAGES
A worker uses a shovel to remove an oil glob from the beach Thursday,... more
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NASA's latest mission doesn't have anything to do with spacecraft or satellites. The space agency is helping thousands of baby sea turtles make their successful pilgrimage to the ocean. Biologists are digging up some 700 turtle nests on northern Gulf beaches affected by the BP oil spill, from Panama City to Apalachicola, Florida, and relocating them to NASA's Kennedy Space Center (KSC) on Florida's Space Coast.
To simulate the natural environment, the eggs will be buried in damp sand inside Styrofoam coolers and transported via a temperature-controlled truck to KSC. There, they will be held and monitored at an undisclosed facility until they hatch. Once the turtles begin to break free from their shells, they will be moved quickly to nearby beaches to make their trek to the sea, where they feed exclusively along the line of Sargassum seaweed at the edge of the current. Most of the nests are made by the threatened loggerhead sea turtle, but some are possibly from three endangered species -- Kemp's ridley, leatherback, and green sea turtles. Each nest has 100-120 eggs.
Only about one in 1,000 sea turtle hatchlings typically survives to adulthood under the best conditions. Experts say that with oil right off the Gulf Coast, the turtles' odds of survival there drop to virtually zero. BP's ongoing Deepwater Horizon oil spill has released hundreds of millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico and is considered the largest offshore spill in U.S. history.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, National Marine Fisheries Service, and the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission all played a role in developing the relocation plan. NASA offered to house the turtles until they hatched at its climate-controlled facilities at KSC. Although biologists can't be certain the sea turtle relocation plan will succeed, they say all of this year's hatchlings from the northern Gulf of Mexico will be lost if nothing is done.
http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2010-07/nasa-will-rescuethousands-sea-turtle-eggs-oil-leak-areasNASA's latest mission doesn't have anything to do with spacecraft or... more
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Bloomberg Businessweek
BP, Coast Guard Will Save Turtles From Oil Burns
July 02, 2010, 2:46 PM EDT
(Updates with burned oil in 11th paragraph.)
By Laurel Brubaker Calkins and Allen Johnson Jr.
July 2 (Bloomberg) --
BP Plc and the U.S. Coast Guard have reached an agreement to end the inadvertent killing of endangered sea turtles trapped inside containment booms during controlled burns of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, lawyers said.
“We’ve agreed to meet to work out the terms to make sure the turtles are protected,” Jason Burge, a lawyer for several environmental groups suing to protect the sea turtles, told U.S. District Judge Carl Barbier at an emergency hearing today in New Orleans federal court.
Details will be fleshed out over the weekend so that protections may be in place by the time controlled burns are set to resume on July 6, the lawyers told Barbier. The wildlife groups withdrew their request for a temporary restraining order blocking the burns, on the condition they may renew the request later if the turtle-rescue settlement falls apart.
Burge told Barbier oil-spill clean-up crews have suspended controlled burns because of bad weather caused by Hurricane Alex, the first tropical storm to enter the Gulf of Mexico this year, which slammed into northern Mexico on June 30.
William Eubanks, who also represents the wildlife groups, said in an interview outside the New Orleans courtroom that the activists want to include “qualified observers, like a biologist or a sea turtle researcher” to accompany crews conducting the burns. These trained personnel can spot and safely remove any sea turtles trapped within containment booms.
Mutual Goal
Don Haycraft, BP’s lead lawyer in New Orleans spill-related litigation, said the company will work with the Coast Guard and environmentalists to achieve a mutual goal.
“This effort is an example of BP and the government and the outside parties reaching a common agreement on an issue -- protecting sea turtles -- that is important to everyone,” Haycraft said.
Environmental groups sued BP and the Coast Guard on June 30, seeking to block the use of controlled burns or require all boats involved in the process to rescue turtles from inside floating burn boxes before the oil is ignited.
“BP has already killed or otherwise harmed” hundreds of rare Kemp’s Ridley, Leatherback, Loggerhead and other species of endangered sea turtles through its use of controlled burns or as a result of contamination from the oil spill itself, the lawsuit claims. The animals become trapped when shrimp boats encircle patches of floating oil with fire-resistant booms to create “burn boxes” 60 to 100 feet in diameter, they said.
Swim to Safety
In affidavits filed with the lawsuit, boat captains and turtle rescue workers said they’ve saved numerous sea turtles that were trapped in heavy oil accumulations. Many of these rescued turtles were scooped from sludge floating in the same areas where trawlers were corralling crude for controlled burns. The turtles are too heavily oiled to free themselves from the sludge and swim to safety, although out of the oil they respond well to rehabilitation, the witnesses said.
BP and the Coast Guard estimate that 9.9 million gallons of crude oil recovered from the Deepwater Horizon well have been burned as of July 1, according to a statement on the joint command’s web site.
The wildlife activists added the Coast Guard to the lawsuit after BP said all company clean up and containment activities, including the controlled burns, are being carried out under Coast Guard orders.
BP has yet to contain a damaged underwater well that has been spewing as much as 60,000 barrels of crude oil daily off the Louisiana coast since the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig burned and sank in April.
The case is Animal Welfare Institute v. BP America Inc. et al, 2:10-cv-01866, U.S. District Courts, Eastern District of Louisiana (New Orleans).
--Editors: John Pickering
http://www.biologicaldiversity.org/campaigns/esa_works/gallery/images2/Kemp%27s-Ridley-sea-turtle-USFWS.jpgBloomberg Businessweek
BP, Coast Guard Will Save Turtles From Oil Burns
July 02,... more
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