by coda
The BP-Spill Baby-Turtle Brigade
[Via NYT]
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.”
[More]
The entire article is fascinating and a wonderful example of how the sometimes maniacal focus of people’s hobbies can be harnessed to do incredible things. And not just to save baby turtles.
The beaches in Alabama are surveyed every day by a swarm of volunteers looking for fresh nests. The information from each team is reported to a central location. Every day. For free. After the BP oil spill, the Fish and Wildlife Department in Alabama asked the volunteers if they could take photos of the beaches so they would have a record of what they looked like before any oil it the beaches. Within 48 hours, the Department had photos taken every 500 feet along the entire Alabama coastal beaches.
We so often fault the MSM for not doing a very good job. But this is a very good article – informative, emotional, ruminative. It allowed me to really understand why so many people get excited about turtles. It showed some of the eccentricities of people without denigrating them.
People just wanted to save baby turtles. And in an extraordinary year they did some extraordinary things. Nice to read about it.
