“Helping Sea Turtles Through an Oil Spill”
Running Time 03:37
(Producer and Videographer: Jay Elhard, Denali National Park and Preserve, Alaska)

Speakers:
Monica Hardin, Biological Science Technician
Mark Nicholas, Biologist
Both of Gulf Islands National Seashore, Florida district

HARDIN:
“We try to start right at first daylight. Not necessarily, we don’t wait until the sun comes up. But we do want to be able to see without lights on the beach whenever we start.
“We ride on the beach early in the morning to look for turtle tracks to see if any turtles came up and nested last night.
“Sometimes the turtles, for whatever reason, will lay very, very close to the water, sometimes even below the high tide line. And in those cases we will actually relocate the nest to a dune area.
“We don’t like to relocate. We try not to. But when the turtles basically nest almost in the water, they won’t survive.”

NICHOLAS:
“There is some pressure to move nests in that we know our beaches are going to flood from time to time. And our beaches are so low because we’ve take so many hurricane hits over the last several years that the island is almost just like a sand bar. So we know if we get any type of tropical system coming, we’re going to lose nests. So if a nest is laid very close to the water, we go ahead and move it to a higher area.
“Since there are so few nesting females in the area, each nest is just that much more important. So we try to follow every nest, from the time it’s laid until the time it’s hatched, and get all of the hatchlings into the gulf.
“Basically with all of the oil that’s out in the Gulf of Mexico, we’re pretty certain putting them out there is not a good idea.
“Every nest in northwest Florida and Alabama, they are all going to be pulled out of the ground at around day fifty, put into those coolers, and transported to the east coast.
“Over by Cape Canaveral and Merritt Island there’s a facility over there that’s going to hold them until they hatch, and then they’ll release them on the east coast.
“It’s a pretty big undertaking, because the total I think is supposed to be somewhere around seven hundred nests that will be moved.
“The thought is that by leaving them until day fifty it reduces the chance of mortality on the embryos as you’re moving them. But it also allows them to imprint, if they are imprinting while in the egg, it’s giving them more time to imprint on this area. With the hopes that, if they’re released in the Atlantic, they’ll actually still – if they’re female – twenty to thirty years from now they’ll hopefully come back to this area to nest on these beaches again.”

HARDIN:
“Turtles have been in serious decline over the p ast several years. With all of the beach development, and people visiting the beach more, and living on the beach more, we’re pretty much taking away their habitat.”

NICHOLAS:
“Our populations are already low in northwest Florida, just specifically talking about Loggerheads. So of course we could be removing one whole year of recruitment.
“The mortality rate on hatchlings, everything wants to eat them – from birds, to crabs on the beach, to the fish. So the mortality rate on them is very high. When we start factoring in light pollution, and turtles going the wrong way, and some never even making it into the gulf …
“What’s at stake? It’s whether or not our kids, and their kids are going to be able to see sea turtles nesting out on that beach twenty, thirty, forty years from now. So …”

HARDIN:
“I love working with the protected and endangered species. I like being a part of helping another, you know, one more species make it.”