Critical sea turtle program on Padre Island threatened with cuts - San Antonio Express-News

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For decades, the public releases of baby Kemp’s ridley turtles at the Padre Island National Seashore have been one of the most popular summer rituals of the Texas Gulf Coast.

The feel-good sendoffs on Malaquite Beach near Corpus Christi usually occur early in the day and on short notice. They can draw 1,000 or more visitors.

Packed behind rope barriers, wide-eyed children and their parents track the tiny, gnarly reptiles as they stagger across the sand to the beckoning surf.

When they reach the waves, the hatchlings are transformed: They dip and glide, then bob a time or two, a dark head in the foam, and finally disappear.

“In a lot of ways, it’s like being a mother. You do everything you can up to a point. You find the nest, you protect the eggs and the hatchlings at release,” biologist Donna Shaver, the longtime chief of the National Park Service sea turtle recovery program, said after a release in 2017.

This summer, more than 14,000 hatchlings were quietly sent out to sea, but public releases were canceled because of the pandemic. And the program’s future could be in doubt because of budget cuts proposed by the National Park Service.

Biologists and others involved in the decades-long effort to bring the Kemp’s ridley back from the brink of extinction fear that changes recommended in a critical review could harm the recovery program.

The review “has set off a lot of red flags and alarms around the sea turtle world. I am not sure where this is exactly going to land,” said Jeff George, who runs Sea Turtle Inc., a nonprofit on South Padre Island that protects Kemp’s ridley eggs there.

Among the proposed changes are cutting funding for the turtle program; cutting back on beach patrols that allow spotters to quickly find nests that contain newly laid eggs; and reducing the number of eggs taken to the incubation facility for hatching, instead leaving some to hatch in beach “corrals” and in beach nests.

Other recommendations: shrinking the breadth of turtle research done by Shaver and other park scientists; discontinuing the collection and incubation of eggs from green and loggerhead turtle nests; and limiting the rescue of stranded sea turtles to those found within the park boundaries.

Most significantly, the review questioned the “financial sustainability of the project.”

“The program has grown tremendously … and now has an annual operating budget of $2M which funds nest monitoring and management, research and stranding response. In 3-5 years the program is projecting a budget shortfall,” the report says.

Christopher Marshall, a Texas A&M biology professor and director of the Gulf Center for Sea Turtle Research in Galveston, said his initial reaction was “shock and surprise.”

“What astounds me is that this is the most endangered sea turtle in the world, so sure, our measures are extreme, but here, every egg matters,” he said.

Some see a disguised money grab driven by professional jealousy of Shaver, one of the world’s foremost authorities on the Kemp’s ridley.

Contacted at her park office, Shaver, who has always spoken freely to the press, declined to comment, saying she has been “gagged” by the National Park Service.

A request to speak to park superintendent Eric Brunnemann was denied by a public information officer.

The National Park Service said in a statement that it is strengthening the turtle program’s mission, which it says consumes a quarter of the park’s “base budget.”

Tom Shearer, a retired biologist for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service who led its Kemp’s ridley turtle programs for two decades, said the need remains to establish a self-sustaining population in Texas.

“If it wasn’t for Donna, we wouldn’t have the Kemp’s ridley turtle in Texas and maybe some people would think that’s a good thing, since they have 20,000 in Mexico,” he said.

“But that’s very shortsighted because of the volatility in Mexico. If the economy goes bad and people get hungry, that’s fresh meat. That’s what they did before. It was the killing of the nesters and the collection of the eggs that led to the precipitous drop in the population,” he added.

Marshall, who oversees the Upper Texas Coast Turtle Patrol that collects Kemp’s ridley eggs along a 72-mile stretch of the upper coast, said the recovery program on Padre Island should be seen as the “insurance policy” for the species.

“It was set up in case something catastrophic happens down in Mexico. You literally don’t want all your eggs in one basket on one beach,” he said.

Over the last 10 years, an average of 208 turtle nests have been found on Texas beaches, with the high coming in 2017 when 353 nests were found.

Most turtle scientists think this is far fewer than would be necessary to save the species if the Mexican population was wiped out.

“Here’s the science. The Kemp’s ridley almost disappeared from the planet Earth about 1983. In all of (Texas) and the protected areas of Mexico, they found only 702 nests back then. This year they found over 20,000 nests. So the population is starting to recover, but to say we’ve achieved that goal with 350 nests (in Texas) is a little premature,” George, of Sea Turtle Inc., said.

Shaver’s operation, he said, is also important because of its critical scientific research.

“That’s where Donna’s program has really contributed to the recovery of the species,” he said.

The review’s recommendation to shift from incubating eggs to leaving them in their beach nests or putting them in fenced “corrals” on the beach, as is done in Florida, was met with skepticism.

“By taking the eggs out of the nest you can create a hatching rate of up to 95 percent. If you leave the eggs in the nest on the beaches here, you would probably lose 95 percent,” Marshall said.

Official state sea turtle

The smallest and rarest of sea turtles, the Kemp’s ridley has been federally protected as an endangered species since 1970.

In recent decades it has become well known in Texas, and in 2013 became the official state sea turtle by congressional proclamation.

Historically, most turtles reproduced in Rancho Nuevo, Tamaulipas, which at one time had hundreds of thousands of nests. That population was nearly wiped out in the 1940s and 1950s by egg collection and the slaughter of adult turtles.

For the past 60 years, Mexico and the United States have cooperated in an effort to save the species, in part by establishing a viable secondary breeding population in Texas.

Starting in 1978, eggs from Mexico were brought to the U.S. to be incubated, hatched and released.

Some hatchlings were raised in a “head-start” program in Galveston and released at 11 months of age, but most were released on Padre Island as hatchlings.

Eventually, turtle patrols began to find nests on Texas beaches and protect them from gulls, coyotes and other predators, but progress was slow.

“From 1978 to 1994, only about one Kemp’s ridley nest was recorded in Texas every three years. From 2006 to 2009, between 102 and 209 Kemp’s ridley nests were recorded annually,” according to a National Park Service report.

The anchor program in Texas long has been the one led by Shaver at the national seashore on North Padre Island. She started working there in 1980 as a student volunteer. Since 2003, she has been in charge of the Sea Turtle Science and Recovery Program.

Shaver also is the Texas coordinator for the Sea Turtle Standing and Salvage Network, which rescues injured and stranded turtles.

The turtle nesting season begins in April when the first females arrive and ends sometime in August when the last hatchlings emerge.

Since 1994, about 235,000 baby turtles have been hatched and released along the Texas coast.

Because the nests and baby turtles face a wide range of threats, including coyotes, fire ants, high tides and vehicles driven on the beach, 100 or more volunteers, seasonal workers, staff and others are mobilized during nesting season.

They patrol daily along an 80-mile stretch of beach from Mansfield Channel north to Packery Channel, looking for arriving female turtles and new nests, and when found, removing the eggs for incubation.

Maureen Hurlow, 72, a retired school teacher, has worked as a volunteer and bio-technician for the past 15 years.

After long years of toiling with Shaver in the incubation room, she finds the current crisis baffling and appalling.

“She has done this for 42 years against all odds. When they told her the Kemp’s ridley would not come back, she stuck it out,” she said. “She is also the voice of Kemp’s ridley in research. Why would you want to pull the plug on that?”

Last year, according to Shaver’s annual report, more than 25,000 hours were spent patrolling beaches on the Texas Coast. The patrols on North Padre Island representing about two-thirds of the effort.

Along the entire coast, the report notes, 190 Kemp’s ridley nests were found, 110 of them on North Padre. All told, 15,469 hatchlings were released last year.

NPS complaint filed

In July, a nonprofit watchdog organization filed an administrative complaint on behalf of Shaver with the National Park Service.

The 28-page complaint by the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, based in Washington D.C., says the National Park Service report “suffers from a lack of integrity, accuracy, completeness and reliability,” and asks that it be withdrawn.

It says that some of the review’s recommended changes conflict with federal protections afforded the Kemp’s ridley as an endangered species.

It also asserts that the NPS “circumvented its legal obligations under the National Environmental Policy Act,” by failing to seek public input or conduct an environmental assessment.

And it claims that in complaining about the cost of the sea turtle recovery program, the review was disingenuous by failing to note that the program’s annual funding “has been raised entirely by the efforts of its staff, unlike any other division at the park.”

Jeff Ruch, the PEER lawyer who filed the complaint, said, “Padre Island is cannibalizing one of its best and most important programs for bureaucratic reasons having nothing to do with the sea turtle populations.”

He said the Padre Island program already has been forced to return $300,000 in grants and that Shaver is now prohibited from applying for additional grants.

Noting longstanding friction between key personnel in federal sea turtle programs in Florida and Texas, he said the review appears to be driven more by political and personal agendas than by good turtle science.

“We think this review is the function of some infighting and that the real motive is to divert sea turtle grant money from Texas to Florida. That’s certainly the effect,” he said.

Ruch said he finds the whole unseemly affair to be “sort of a head-scratcher.”

“This program has been featured as one of the things the Park Service is most proud of,” he said.

John MacCormack is a staff writer in the San Antonio and Bexar County area. To read more from John, become a subscriber. JMacCormack@express-news.net | Twitter: @JohnMacCormack

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August 17, 2020 at 04:00PM
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Critical sea turtle program on Padre Island threatened with cuts - San Antonio Express-News

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