Dolphin Washed Up Dead — Gulfport, MS

Still more and more dead animals are washing up on Gulf of Mexico beaches. This dolphin, covered in orange spray paint, was found in Gulfport, Mississippi on May 15th by a local woman. The carcass had been tagged on May 13th by the Institute for Marine Mammal Research (the orange spray paint on the carcass says "IMMR"). The IMMR apparently just left it there to be cleaned up later, decomposing in the hot sun.

Laurel Lockamy, the Gulfport resident, returned the previous day just as a yellow bulldozer arrived to scoop off the dead dolphin and carry it away. The bulldozer carried it away down the beach, and dumped it behind some beach vegetation. So now it is still decomposing in the hot sun, but now it's behind some bushes.

© Laurel Lockamy - Gulfport, MS

These are beaches where families take their kids to play. Dead animals keep washing up... is this safe? Why aren't parents worried about their kids playing next to dead, decaying sea turtles, dolphins, and birds on the beach? The strandings of dead animals have become so frequent in the Gulf now that locals have begun bringing their cameras with them to the beach and documenting the strandings themselves.

“All these dead things on the beach. It never used to be like this before. I’m almost afraid to walk on the beach anymore," said Laurel.

Read the article about this dolphin stranding.

It's Now Sea Turtle Nesting Season in the Gulf!

Latest reports from sea turtle biologist Donna Shaver of Padre Island National Seashore indicate that 78 Kemp's ridleys have already nested along the Texas coast! Want to see exactly where they've been nesting? Click here for a map!
In addition, the Atlantic green turtles are nesting in Tortuguero, Costa Rica; the loggerhead turtles are nesting on the West Florida coast; leatherbacks have arrived to nest on Eastern Florida beaches as well as Southern Georgia. There's a lot going on everywhere!

But now that the sea turtles are nesting and the little hatchlings will emerge soon, there is much to be done to ensure that the babies make it out to the sea. Here's a quick little list of just some ways to help out:

• Owners of beachfront property must turn out any porch lights after sunset, and use blackout curtains to keep light from getting out of their homes and shining out towards the beaches. Light bothers nesting sea turtles (except for red light). Plus, little hatchlings use light reflection off of the waves from the moon and stars to guide themselves toward the water. If they instead follow city lights inland, you will have lots of dead baby sea turtles all over city streets and parking lots in the morning.
• Again, if you own beachfront property, make sure you clear the beach of any umbrellas, chairs, or other obstacles that may block a sea turtle mother from nesting on the beach.
• And also, lock up your garbage because loose garbage = raccoons = animals that will eat baby sea turtles.
• Clean up beach litter to prevent sea turtles from becoming entangled, or to prevent them from eating it. Ingestion of plastic causes intestinal blockages, malnourishment, and may eventually lead to death.
• Support sea turtle conservation projects! Join a volunteer night patrol.

It's exciting news to hear about nesting sea turtles, especially with the abnormally high numbers of stranded turtles popping up everywhere in the Gulf of Mexico. This year so far we've already seen the sea turtle death toll reach way higher than the normal average (around 150 reported). Most of the time though, accidental catches of sea turtles by fishermen are not even recorded, and the dead sea turtle is thrown overboard to sink and decay at the bottom of the ocean. Scientists estimate that the real number of marine mammals harmed in the BP spill may be up to 50 times higher than what we can observe.

The high number of sea turtle deaths may not even be because of the oil spill—it is most likely because of shrimp trawling. The data all points to shrimp trawling as the top killer of sea turtles in the United States. 

Today I Added Up Totals of Stranded Sea Turtles...

One of my tasks at my internship today was to go through a bunch of excel sheets and total up the number of stranded (dead) sea turtles in the Gulf of Mexico. Quite a depressing job. It took a while, because there were different sets of data for Alabama, Florida (Gulf coast), Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas. Florida and Texas by far had the greatest numbers, but I suspect it's because of their longer coastlines.

Here's what I found:
2007... 1252 total strandings.
2008... 1078 total strandings.
2009... 1259 total strandings.
2010... (BP oil spill) 2264 total strandings.
2011... we are not even half way through the year and the total number recorded is 1184.

:( Not a happy day at work today.

The BP Oil Spill—1 year and 6 days later

On April 20, 2010 the Deepwater Horizon exploded, killing 11 men and injuring 17. The oil flowed out of the uncapped well for 3 months and released 4.9 million barrels of crude oil.  1 barrel of crude oil = 19 gallons of gasoline. That's about how much my car will hold. Theoretically, I could have driven over 1.5 billion miles on that load of crap that spilled into the ocean.

The short-term effects we've all seen: tar balls washing up on shores, oil plumes remaining underwater, oiled animals washing up, coastal habitats destroyed. But as the oil is slowly dispersed, it doesn't mean that it has gone away from the ecosystem. It's still there, but just in smaller batches and smaller parts. Oil that washes up on sandy beaches, for example, just sinks down into the layers of sand where it remains for decades, and possible centuries. There is still oil and tar on the beaches near Santa Barbara from an oil spill in 1969, and that spill was only 80,000 to 100,000 barrels.

So what about now? What are the long-term effects we are seeing? Well, for starters, some of the dispersal chemicals used in the cleanup process are known carcinogens to humans. So people involved in cleanup are at risk, and now these chemicals are out in the ocean where they have the potential to harm marine life as well. (If you haven't noticed I'm probably more concerned with the marine life in the Gulf, who cares what happens to the humans involved.) Also, I've just read on Wikipedia that dispersants have a serious impact on phytoplankton as well. We're killing the whole food chain/Gulf ecosystem from the bottom, up.

Other long-term effects we've seen: In 2011 alone, 77 dolphins have washed up dead on Gulf shores, but it's also been concluded that that number may be up to 50 times less than the real number of dolphin deaths caused by the spill. I think there's been about 200 since the spill. And what's more is all this scientific data is now being held and won't be shared because it is being used in the criminal investigation of the oil spill. So we won't know for sure what's going on for a while. You should check out this article, but beware of sad photos :(

At least 250 dead sea turtles have washed up in 2011 alone, over 130 seen this month alone. Usually about 150 dead turtles wash up every YEAR. So we've hit some unfortunate records there. That doesn't even count the other 400 plus turtles that were impacted because of the spill, primarily Kemp's ridleys but also loggerheads, greens, and hawksbills that inhabit Gulf of Mexico waters.
  STRP Action Alert click here!

On the human health side of things—oil is not good for you. It damages your respiratory tract, your skin and causes miscarriages. The fishing industry is suffering seriously from the spill, costing people their livelihoods. Gulf coast tourism was affected as well. Overall, is offshore drilling worth the risk? We'll be seeing these effects for years and decades, probably centuries to come. I hope someday people will realize that fossil fuels are not the answer—we need clean, renewable energy now!

Someone please answer me: Why haven't we learned from our mistakes?

ISTS Day 1: "Well this is going to be interesting, isn't it?"

Technically day 1 was Monday, but nothing exciting happened except for that myself and the other members of the Turtle Island Restoration Network team arrived at the symposium safe and sound. Now we're all registered, and things yesterday really kicked off.

This morning was the welcome event, which I missed... whoops. But there were lovely talks by Jeffrey Seminoff, the ISTS President, Peter Pritchard, a well known sea turtle zoologist, and Karen Bjorndal, a Prof at U of Florida who is also a sea turtle conservationist. Or I guess they were lovely, I wasn't there but I heard good things. The lesson here is to get there at 8 am even if you are told you don't have to be.

I did arrive just in time for the four-hour-long special session on "Finding Common Ground in Fisheries Management."It was a panel session made up of a few fishermen, a few men from the commercial fishing industry, an economist, a random professor who somehow knew something about fisheries but not sea turtles, and two representatives of environmental organizations (STRP and the Sea Turtle Conservancy).

First off, this symposium has over a thousand people in attendance. For some reason they decided to make this whole panel a bunch of old white men (and one woman), and the most diversity obtained was from an old white Australian man. They couldn't have gotten anyone else from the hundred other countries in attendance to speak about artesian fishing communities? Really?

Well despite that, the panel was incredibly interesting because of the bickering that went between Todd Steiner (STRP Director) and the fishermen/commercial fishery fellows. The first panelist introduced was a man named Peter Dupuy, who is a bitter California fisherman. Bitter, because he is no longer allowed to fish in California waters, understandable. He made his point that he had never harmed sea turtles with his fishery, and then showed pictures of Ostional, Costa Rica and claimed that they were poaching eggs. For a little background: Ostional is a community that harvests sea turtle EGGS in low low numbers. In exchange they provide necessary protection for the rest of the eggs, and they do not harm any of the actual nesting mother turtles. Overall, it is a completely sustainable program that has actually been beneficial to the sea turtle population.
Obviously someone didn't do his research. He also started calling unnamed NGOs "eco-terrorists"

The next panelist that was introduced was Marydelle Donnelly from the Sea Turtle Conservancy, and she flat out said that the National Marine Fisheries Service was to blame for not doing enough to help endangered sea turtles affected by the fishing industry.

I have written down a bunch of notes from this panel, but for the most part all I have written for the men from the fishing industry is "blah blah blah." They literally did not answer a single question asked of them and they bounced around from topic to topic, offering nothing except their opinions and not encouraging discussion. I believe the entire point of this panel was to get these individuals to see each others points of view, and to find a "common ground" on which they could agree. Naturally, this was not accomplished. There was a lot of talk that managing sustainable fisheries in order to protect sea turtles needs to be a part of a multinational effort, but honestly a bunch of white guys (and a gal) saying this is not going to help matters.

The Australian guy didn't seem to care about much, he explained the scientific method to a bunch of scientists. Really? Necessary? I think not. He did explain that the change in fishing and improved conservation needs to come from within communities, especially artesian fishing communities in third world countries. He said something about reaching out to the witch doctor in order to get the rest of the population to follow. The lesson of this story is, "Always look for the witch doctor first."


I loved most of the points Todd made—I have to, he's my executive director. He confronted the fishery guys about the use of special hooks and Turtle Excluder Devices (TEDs), supporting that these technological advances are not going to work to save sea turtles all by themselves. There also needs to be other regulations in addition, there needs to be critical habitat established where fishing will not be allowed, and also a collaboration of efforts on protecting sea turtle nesting beaches. Every stage of the sea turtle's lives needs to be protected in order for their populations to rebound.

After that very long session, I grabbed some lunch and sat at our Turtle Island table in the main room until my supervisor, Chris Pincetich, gave his talk on challenges faced saving sea turtles during the BP oil spill. It was a short presentation but he brought light to a lot of issues that need to be addressed. During the BP spill, he explained, there was no on-water rescues of sea turtles being conducted until much damage had already been done. The coast guard especially weren't concerned with the animals out at sea that might have been affected, they waited until the animals washed up on shore to help them out. Not okay.

After his presentation it was time for the poster presentations and the cocktail hour. I grabbed a glass of wine and headed over to my poster and chatted with several people about my poster. I'll probably do an entire post on my poster and the points made in my poster because this post has really gone on for way too long.

Today is "Student Day" so there is much to look forward too. Student mixer tonight (another free drink!) followed by the Wild & Scenic Sea Turtle film festival where we will be showing The Heartbreak Turtle Today. I'll be here at the symposium until around 10 tonight with free wi-fi access, so I think I'll survive.

Pictures to come! As soon as I find my card reader...

They're cute, they're little... they're the Kemp's ridleys!

Yesterday was the grand public premiere of STRP’s documentary, The Heartbreak Turtle Today, in Sausalito, CA. The film is about the recovery of Kemp’s ridley sea turtles in the Gulf, and the threats to their survival. Before the film my supervisor gave a presentation about the work he had conducted last summer dealing with the BP oil spill aftermath. We had a decent turn out, a few people bought DVDs, and all of them signed the petition we had out to “hold BP accountable for the disaster in the Gulf.”

The Kemp’s ridleys (Lepidochelys kempii)are the most critically endangered of all sea turtle species. Decades ago they were nicknamed the Heartbreak turtle by fishermen who would say these turtles “died of a broken heart” when they were turned on their backs. Because fishermen were (are?) cruel, cruel beings who watch sea turtles suffer as they are flipped on their backs and struggle to get away.

Before the event had even began, the other intern and I were setting up a table of STRP information and merchandise and I came across a pile of old Viva La Tortuga (STRP) newsletters from 2007. Inside was a full page article that read, “Protections in Gulf Waters Lead to Record Kemps Ridley Nestings.” Oh the irony.

Over 10 years ago STRP had convinced then-Texas Governor George W. Bush to close state waters to shrimping from December to May—critical nesting period for Kemp’s ridleys. In the six years before this closure, only 60 nests were laid in total on Texas beaches. In the six years after this closure, there were four times as many nests. A great improvement, but ultimately shrimpers still kill hundreds and hundreds of turtles each year.

More and more turtles have been washing up on Gulf coast beaches. Dead. From oil-related reasons most likely, because the shrimping season is only about to begin.

Baby dolphins too.

Despite all this, offshore oil drilling continues…

Kemp’s ridley Profile

Appearance: The smallest of all sea turtle species, they only get to be about two feet long, and weigh up to 100 lbs. Hatchlings are black, but adults tend to be gray-green or dark gray with a cream colored underside.

Location: The only Kemp’s ridley nesting beaches are found on the coasts of Mexico and Texas. Primarily they inhabit the Gulf of Mexico in Louisiana waters, but can sometimes be found along the Eastern U.S. coast.

Food: They eat mollusks, crustaceans, jellyfish, algae and seaweed. Crab and shrimp are favorites.

Reproduction: During the daytime, large groups of nesting females emerge from the ocean nearly simultaneously, an event called an arribada. In the 1940s, thousands of Kemp’s ridleys could be seen at once on the same beach. Unfortunately, because of the serious threats they face, only one percent of hatchlings grow to sexual maturity of about 10 years old.

Threats: Shrimp trawls are #1—in 2009 NMFS estimates that over 4000 Kemp's ridleys were killed from interactions with shrimping activities. Poaching is the second big one. Because they nest together in large numbers during the daytime, it is easy for poachers to take the eggs they are laying right from under them. Boat collisions are another threat, and so is ingestion of/entanglement in marine debris. Oh, and last but not least OIL is another big killer. Thanks a lot BP! Also thanks for burning hundreds of sea turtles alive, you jerks.

Visit STRP's website to find more information about Kemp's ridley sea turtles and The Heartbreak Turtle Today!!!!

The Heartbreak Turtle Today, a documentary

Ever since I started my internship here at STRP I have been primarily working on outreach for this educational documentary, The Heartbreak Turtle Today. On day 1 of my internship I watched this film 2 or 3 times, and began work on a press kit to be sent along with DVD copies to PBS stations across the country. Since then we've sent it out to 14 PBS stations in Washington, Oregon, California, Florida, Georgia, and Mississippi, as well as 4 local access stations in Florida. And I've still got 60 more local access networks to contact that I haven't gotten around to yet.

I literally just got off the phone with a producer for one of the local PBS stations here in CA, and he said that he wants to show The Heartbreak Turtle Today on the anniversary of the BP oil spill. Which is AWESOME :) !!!!!

I think it really shows that community and local efforts can make a huge difference. Really touching stuff. I don't want people to think that they have to be in the Gulf of Mexico to make a difference when it comes to sea turtle and marine life conservation. Even if you are in the landlocked Midwest (hello, mi familia) you still have a tremendous impact on important conservation matters such as fossil fuel use, plastic use and recycling. So don't think you aren't important! Everyone matters!

Here's a bit more info on the movie:

You can see a preview here.

The Heartbreak Turtle Today is the story of the dramatic recovery of the endangered Kemp’s ridley sea turtles in the Gulf of Mexico. Kemp's ridley sea turtles are the smallest and most critically endangered of all seven species of sea turtles in the world. In 1985 it was estimated that there were about 500 nesting females in the Gulf of Mexico, and now conservation efforts have helped their population grow to about 8,000 nesting females. Such a great improvement!

This documentary was produced by the Sea Turtle Restoration Project and Sunset Productions in order to show the efforts being made to help bring this population of sea turtles back from near extinction. The BP oil spill occurred in the middle stages of film production, and we get a closer look at the devastating after-effects through this moving documentary.

If you are in the Northern SF Bay Area and want to see this film, we've got a public premiere showing happening on March 29 at 7:00 pm at the Bay Model Visitor Center. The film will be followed by an interactive Q&A sesh and presentation on more local CA conservation efforts, it should be fun! So come join us!

Hopefully you'll see The Heartbreak Turtle Today on your local PBS station soon! :)

Reform Offshore Oil Regulations!

Extinction is forever, petroleum and gas will only last us so much longer... So tell me, is offshore drilling really worth it?

BP neglected marine life in their clean up efforts after the Deepwater Horizon explosion, including the burning of sea turtles alive. We at the Sea Turtle Restoration Project are calling for improved oil spill response, restoration, and improved protection for sea turtles and marine life against oil and gas.

You can make a difference! Tell Congress and Obama to rebuild offshore oil regulations to include protective measures for sea turtles. Take action today.

It literally takes two seconds to do, are you really that freaking busy?

Thanks :)