Kaci Milligan: Sea Turtles

The Salvation of Marine Sea Turtles is in Our Hands
Kaci Milligan

Along the beaches of Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas, a crucial species is struggling. The offspring of this species must make one of the most difficult journeys of any young species on the planet. After hatching, these babies must travel from their sandy nests on the shores of beaches to their home, the sea. This trip is an incredibly long distance for a newly born baby to make. The offspring must make this trip at night when the air is cooler or risk baking in the following day’s sun. After this long journey, this precious species must then survive the vicious sea and the factors that endanger them there, including human development, fishing gear, fishing nets, poaching and the disastrous phenomena such as the Gulf Oil spill.
These important keystone species are the various sea turtles that nest in the Gulf of Mexico. Under United States regulations, four sea turtle species, Green, Hawksbill, Kemp’s Ridley and Leatherback, are listed as endangered and the Loggerhead sea turtle is listed as threatened. The United States regulation, the Endangered Species Act (ESA), is a federal regulation that protects any endangered or threatened species in the United States. In addition, states provide conservation plans for endangered or threatened species. Sea turtles are protected under the ESA as well as the state conservation plans. Despite of all this protection, sea turtle populations are still decreasing. The federal and state protections leave holes in the protection provided for sea turtles. This decrease in population is caused by actions taken by humans that are not regulated under federal and states laws. With all this information, there are many questions that still need to be answered about sea turtles: What makes sea turtles species endangered? What is an endangered species? What does the ESA do to protect these endangered species? What do the state conservation plans do to protect endangered species? How do these regulations protect sea turtles? How do unexpected events, such as the Gulf Oil Spill, put these regulations to work? In understanding these questions, one can better determine the protection this species gets under federal and state plans.
Sea turtles face risks at every stage of their life cycle, from eggs to their adulthood in the sea. The five species of sea turtles all nest along beaches in the coastal states of the Gulf of Mexico, which include Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas. Sea turtles spend most of their life in the ocean, except when females lay their eggs on the sandy shores of the coast. Female sea turtles will come ashore to dig a hole and bury their eggs in the sand. After laying the eggs, the females will never see their offspring again. While in the sandy shores of the beach, sea turtle eggs are vulnerable to predators such as raccoons and other mammals that will find the buried nests and eat the eggs.
After surviving predators, the newly hatched sea turtles must make their way out of the sandy nest and all the way to the ocean. This is an incredibly challenging and long journey for the newly hatched offspring, and many do not make it to the ocean. This journey is made at night while the air is cooler and the sea turtles will not burn up in the sun. The sea turtles must follow moonlight on the way to their home, but sometimes artificial light from human development leads them the wrong way. This takes them farther away from the ocean and, in the day, they will be found burnt on the beaches.
After the sea turtles make it into the ocean, they face many other obstacles to their existence. Many sea turtles can become caught in fishing nets, especially from shrimp fishing, long line and gillnets. The leading cause of sea turtle deaths is shrimp nets. Sea turtles are caught as bycatch and drown because they can’t reach the surface for air. However, there are Turtle Excluder Devices, TED, that help prevent sea turtles from becoming bycatch in these shrimp nets.
Another obstacle to sea turtle populations is the threat of poaching. In many places, sea turtle eggs and meat were eaten as a delicacy. Before strict national and international regulations, many turtle nests were dug up to sell the eggs and the commercial harvesting of the turtle meat was common. Because of the amount of harvesting, the sea turtle population greatly declined between 1947 and 1966, before such federal regulations like the Endangered Species Act. Poaching is one of the leading reasons that sea turtles were placed on the Endangered Species List soon after the ESA was passed by Congress. Due to stricter regulations, egg and meat harvesting has slightly declined (Texas Department of Wildlife and Parks).
Other than these foreseeable events that endanger sea turtles, the greatest current danger to sea turtles is the Deepwater Horizon oil spill into the Gulf of Mexico. Sea turtles are exposed to oil in the Gulf two different ways, through external exposure and internal exposure. External exposure occurs when sea turtles swim through oil in the water and oil can get on their skin and causing burning and irritation. Also, the oil can get into the mucus membranes and make the animal more susceptible to infections, such as pneumonia. Internal exposure can occur in three ways, either from inhaling the oil dispersants, by eating prey that has been covered in oil or by swallowing water with oil in it. Inhalation of the volatile chemicals can cause respiration problems, damage to the liver or kidneys, and gastrointestinal problems. Consuming prey that is oil-covered or swallowing water mixed with the oil brings the violate chemicals into the sea turtles organs and can cause the internal problems (“Impacts of Oil on Marine Mammals and Sea Turtles”).
Dead sea turtles that are washed ashore can be tested for evidence of oil. However, there are many dead sea turtles that never wash ashore, leaving a large sample out of scientists’ tests. Also, the causes of death for sea turtles are hard to determine. In an earlier oil spill, from the Ixtoc 1 that spilled oil into the Gulf of Mexico in 1979, sea turtle populations declined dramatically. There are many factors affecting sea turtle deaths and their population decline. It is difficult for scientists to determine the exact cause of sea turtle deaths and place blame on oil as the major factor (Kaufman, “Gulf Spill”).
Due to all these obstacles that sea turtles face, mostly due to human impact, their overall population is dramatically decreased. For this reason, the four species in the Gulf of Mexico are listed on the Threatened and Endangered Species List decided by the US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS). This list is under the federal regulation known as the Endangered Species Act, ESA. The ESA was passed in 1973 to protect species from extinction. The main goal is to protect the species threatened or endangered by “all methods and procedures necessary to bring any endangered or threatened species to the point at which the measures provided pursuant to [the] Act are no longer necessary" (Bortman, Marci, etc). The act designates the species as either threatened or endangered. A threatened species is one that is “likely to become an endangered species within the foreseeable future throughout all or a significant portion of its range" and an endangered species is one that is “in danger of extinction throughout all or a significant portion of its range" (Phelps & Lehman). Even though these laws have power behind them to protect species, the sea turtle populations are still in great danger. These federal regulations have flaws that are shown by unexpected events such as the oil spill. The critics and weakness of the law will be discussed. As citizens of the United States, we have power over these federal regulations and the ability to change such weakness in the laws to better help protect this keystone species.

After the enlisting of the species, a critical habitat can be designated for a species. This habitat is “essential to the species conservation” which requires special management and protection (US Fish and Wildlife, “Critical habitat”). This habitat can be one that is not currently occupied by the species, but a species can occupy the area. The area designated as critical habitat is determined by biologists to contain features that are needed for the recovery of the species. Under the ESA, every species gets equal protection. The only extra protection is for the critical habitat itself; it must be “protected by the prohibition against destruction and adverse modification of critical habitat” (US Fish and Wildlife, “Critical habitat”). The only activities that are affected by a critical habitat designation are “activities that involve a Federal permit, license, or funding, and are likely to destroy or adversely modify the area of critical habitat will be affected” (US Fish and Wildlife, “Critical habitat”). If the activity does not fall into that category, then the proposed activity may move forward.

When the USFWS designates critical habitat, it consults biologists and considers the economics of designating critical habitat. If the economic disadvantages are too great, the USFWS will not designate critical habitat for a species. Furthermore, some species lack critical habitat simply because there is a backlog on adding species to the threatened and endangered species list from a moratorium imposed by Congress that ended in 1996. After the moratorium, the main priority of the USFWS was to enlist species on the threatened and endangered species list. Also, designating critical habitat may harm the species more by provoking “negative public sentiment to the designation, to inaccuracies in the initial area designated, and to the fact that there is often a misconception among other Federal agencies that if an area is outside of the designated critical habitat area” (US Fish and Wildlife, Critical Habitat). The USFWS believes that by creating critical habitat for certain controversial species would be more harmful to the species because of the negative public light they would be in. In creating controversial critical habitat, other agencies and the public believe that the land in this critical habitat is “closed down” and can’t be used for any type of use, which is a popular myth. The Green and Hawksbill species have designated critical habitat in Puerto Rico. The Leatherback species has critical habitat designated in the Virgin Islands. The Loggerhead and Kemp’s Ridley have critical habitat designated in Port Canaveral in Cape Canaveral, Florida.

Along with listing endangered species and designating critical habitat, the USFWS have another role in protecting species. The USFWS should influence other federal agencies to help protect endangered species through their comments on biological assessments that influence endangered species. The Minerals Management Services, a federal agency that sells leases for offshore drilling and is in charge of the policies for drilling, developed a biological assessment that stated a very low impact to wildlife if a deepwater oil spill occurred in the Gulf of Mexico. The assessment stated that if an oil spill occurred it would “[pose] no significant risk to wildlife” and the finding was based on a small scale spill, one thousand to fifteen thousand barrels, which is tiny compared to what an actual oil spill would create (Kaufman, "Agency Signed Off”). The role of the USFWS was to review this biological assessment and make recommendations. The USFWS can’t stop the Minerals Management Service from selling drilling leases, but it could have made comments that the assessment did not provide an adequate report on the damage to wildlife. That could deter companies that would be worried about environmental groups suing them in case of an oil spill. The USFWS did not comment on the assessment so the assessment did not deter any companies, and the result of an actual oil spill to the marine life is devastating. This case shows one gap in federal protection and will be discussed more after reviewing state conservation plans (Kaufman, "Agency Signed Off").

Also, after enlistment, conservation plans must be developed both on the state and federal levels for recovering the species. The states that have a conservation plan for these species are the Gulf coastal states of Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas. Each state develops its individual conservation guidelines. Congress requires states that receive federal funds for endangered species to address the concern of the “greatest conservation need” (GCN). This GCN is included in the different Comprehensive Wildlife Conservation Strategy for each Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana. These plans must provide eight key elements outlined by Congress.
(1) information on the distribution and abundance of species of wildlife, (2) descriptions of locations and relative condition of key habitats and community types essential to conservation, (3) descriptions of problems which may adversely affect species identified or their habitats, and priority research and survey efforts, (4) descriptions of conservation actions proposed to conserve the identified species and habitats, (5) proposed plans for monitoring species identified and their habitats, for monitoring the effectiveness of the conservation actions proposed and for adapting these conservation actions to respond appropriately to new information or changing conditions, (6) descriptions of procedures to review the State Comprehensive Wildlife Conservation Strategy, (7) plans for coordinating the development, implementation, review, and revision of the State comprehensive wildlife conservation strategy with Federal, State, and local agencies and Indian tribes that manage significant land and water areas within the State or administer programs that significantly affect the conservation of identified species and habitats, (8) Broad public participation is an essential element of developing and implementing these Comprehensive Wildlife Conservation Strategies
(“Alabama Comprehensive Wildlife Conservation Strategy”)
These elements must appear in the state’s plan for all threatened and endangered species. The state conservation plans are more specific to the sites where species live, while the federal regulations are more of an umbrella over all the species. The federal regulations outline the needs of the endangered species, while the state conservation plans are more specific to the places in the state where the species live. Even though they are more specific than the federal regulations, the state conservation plans are vague on specific species’ recovering.
In the state of Alabama, the Department of Conservation and Natural Resources has recently developed an Alabama Comprehensive Wildlife Conservation Strategy. This plan is “a step in a process to facilitate a comprehensive approach to fish and wildlife management” and the management plans are still in progress (“Alabama Comprehensive Wildlife Conservation Strategy”). The purpose of this program is to provide management actions for the GCN species as well as for their specific habitat. The plan must address eight required elements, as stated by Congress, for all the GCN species as well as all the other wildlife in Alabama. Each habitat is considered and the list of GCN species is listed within the habitat. The plan identifies general habitat conservation goals as well as for each specific species. Sea turtles are found in the beach and dune habitat conservation section. Some reasons listed for species decline are predation, nesting habitat loss and habitat fragmentation. The conservation goals of sea turtles include gathering more information about the species, protecting nests and protecting habitat from development.
Mississippi Department of Wildlife, Fisheries and Parks has a Comprehensive Wildlife Conservation Strategy. The eight elements are listed in the plan and each type of habitat has its own conservation goals. The sea turtles are identified as the GCN species in the Estuary and Mississippi Sound habitat. Some of the reasons listed for the endangerment of sea turtles are incidental capture, channel modification and low water quality. The conservation plan’s actions are to gather data, limit human development in habitat areas and educate the public on restoration actions.
The Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries had a Comprehensive Wildlife Conservation Strategy but revised it into the state’s Wildlife Action Plan. The three main goals of this plan are species conservation, habitat conservation and public education and outreach. Sea turtles are in the Barrier Islands habitat and Marine habitat. The conservation goals of the sea turtles in these two habitats are promote shoreline stability, limit recreational use of areas and promote education of the conservation activities.
In the state of Florida, sea turtles have a species specific conservation plan, the “Marine Turtle Conservation Plan”. The conservation guidelines include permit guidelines that allows citizens to perform restoration activities for sea turtles, such as nesting monitoring and coastal construction monitoring. A permit holder may be an advisor to a contractor who would like to do construction on a beach where sea turtles nests. Also, permit holders are trained in how to protect sea turtle nests, transport live or dead sea turtles within Florida; hold certain sea turtles for education, rehabilitation or research, or tagging sea turtles (“Marine Turtle Conservation Plan”).
In cooperation with the USFWS, the Texas Parks and Wildlife developed the “Endangered and Threatened Animals of Texas: Their life history and management”. This document discusses all the threatened and endangered species of the state and their life history. Each species has its own management actions and goals described. For sea turtles, the recovery effort is focused on preserving the beaches for the nests and egg protection. A program that the state of Texas provides, with cooperation of the Mexican government, is a “head start” program that incubates eggs to protect them from predation and relocates the sea turtles after hatching. This program will release hatched sea turtle babies on a beach so that they will “imprint” or remember that specific beach so that they can lay eggs in their adulthood (“Endangered and Threatened Animals of Texas: Their life history and management”). After their “imprinting”, the sea turtles were kept for nine to eleven months until they were released back into the wild. By keeping sea turtles for their delicate first months, the risks of predation is reduced. Once the sea turtles reach an age of nine to eleven months, they are more likely to survive into adulthood, allowing for reproduction and population growth (Ramit).
With federal and state programs, the sea turtle species have many regulations to help promote their population growth. The Endangered Species Act does a great deal to protect endangered species and their habitats. By defining endangered and threatened species, the USFWS has criteria that they follow to list species. After enlistment, a species may qualify for the designation of critical habitat, an area that is needed for the recovery of the species. Each of the sea turtle species has a designated critical habitat. The state conservation plans follow a more habitat or species specific plan, while federal regulations cover all threatened and endangered species in umbrella type protection. Now that I have explained the definitions and causes of how this keystone species came to be on the endangered species list, I will analyze the effectiveness of these regulations and what can change to better protect these sea turtles.
Covered in oil and struggling to breathe, a female sea turtle makes her way to the sandy shores. She was born on this beach and will make a nest to lay her offspring. These new female sea turtles will “imprint” this beach in their minds and return to continue the tradition. However, this is one of the beaches that were greatly impacted during the Gulf Oil Spill. The female mother is struggling to get through the foul, oily water to the beach and lay her eggs. Even if she can muster the strength to make a nest, these young offspring must come back to an increasingly developed beach. New homes are being built and vehicles cruise along the shore. Due to these circumstances, the marine keystone species of sea turtles have declining populations and are in need of help. This help comes in the form of federal and state recovery plans that protect these species and their habitats. However, the populations are still in decline and a closer examination of these regulations will show their flaws. After analysis of these regulations, recommendations will be made to improve them so that they can help protect sea turtles and other species on the endangered and threatened species list.
The ESA is the most important federal regulation that protects threatened and endangered species. This act, passed in 1973 under the Nixon Administration, has been an important factor in bringing species back to stable population levels. This act develops a recovery plan for every species on the list. Since December 1988, the ESA recovery plans must include the following elements: “a description of specific management actions necessary to achieve recovery, objective criteria by which recovery will be measured, and time and cost estimates for plan implementation” (Clark). Other information, such as current knowledge of species biology and summaries of threats to species, is generally included but not required.

One way that the ESA has benefitted sea turtles is the type of recovery plan the USFWS has developed. There are two types of recovery plans: single species recovery plans that are only for one specific species, and multispecies plans for a variety of species. Multispecies plans have different species in the plan for reasons such as similar threats to the species. The USFWS has developed single species plans for marine sea turtles. According to research done of the effectiveness of the ESA and recovery plans, single species plans are more comprehensive and rely on more species-specific biology than multispecies recovery plans. Also, the USFW develops recovery tasks to be implemented in every recovery plan, both multispecies and single species plans. However, studies have shown that in the multispecies plans the recovery tasks have a lower rate of being implemented. Being included in a single species recovery plan has benefitted the sea turtles because the plans have more species specific information and are more likely to achieve recovery tasks designated to the plan (Clark).
While the three required elements are crucial to recovery plans, current biological knowledge of a species and a summary of the threats are also very important to recovery plans, even though they are not required for recovery plans. I found that current biology is not included in recovery plans of four species of sea turtles. The Leatherback and Hawksbills sea turtle recovery plans has not been revised since 1993 and the Loggerhead and Green sea turtle recovery plans have not been updated since 1991. These recovery plans have had some revisions, but these plans fail to fully integrate new biological knowledge gathered. Revisions for recovery plans need to include not only the most current biological information that is species specific, but also changes in the management practices to integrate the new information gathered.

Another criticism of the ESA is the consideration of economics in listing a species. As written in the law, species are considered for the threatened or endangered lists based on only biology. However, the ESA has developed the Endangered Species Committee or the “God Squad”. This committee has been given this name because they are cabinet-level members that can have a development project continue in the habitat of an endangered or threatened species if the benefits of the project outweigh the harm done to the species. This type of consideration compares the economic value of the development project compared to the value of an endangered species. There has only been a few times that the “God Squad” has been called to meet. In 1978, a dam construction project was stalled because of the listing of the snail darter, a small fish. The case was brought to the “God Squad” and they ruled in favor of the snail darter. The three times that this committee has met, they have only ruled once in favor of the development project. However, with the creation of the “God Squad”, there will always be the possibility that a development project could be ruled in favor for and the listed species could be ruled against. The consideration of economics in the process of listing a species undermines the main concept of the ESA, which is meant to only use biology to list a species. The “God Squad” should be abolished because economics should not be considered while listing a species and should be based only on biology (Bjerklie, “The Endangered Species Act and Its Discontents”).
With the ESA as the backbone of the recovery of endangered species, state conservation plans supplement the specifics that the general federal regulations can’t provide. Each state that a species of sea turtles nest in has included the species in its conservation plan. Three of the five states, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana, have a Comprehensive Wildlife Conservation Strategy. These plans provide the eight elements required by Congress, as mentioned above, and include every GCN species and their habitats. Sea turtles are listed in a variety of habitats for each state and the conservation goals deal with the specific habitat. This leads to vague conservation goals that are not directly linked to specific species. Examples of these goals are to gather more data, reduce predation and protect habitat. However, these goals are repeated in other parts of the plans for different species and can easily become universal to all threatened and endangered species. Protection of habitat is essential in state conservation plans because the ESA can’t cover the different habitats in different states, but the goals of these states’ plans are too general and vague.
The two remaining states have a more specific approach to sea turtle recovery. In Texas’ plan, “Endangered and Threatened Animals of Texas: Their life history and management”, each species is discussed individually. For every species, the plan reviews its history and current status as well as specific management and recovery goals. For sea turtles, this document discusses the specific “head start” program that helps protect the offspring of sea turtles. This plan is very species specific and has management goals that are just for the benefit of sea turtles nesting along its shores. The recommendation that can be made to this plan is to summarize the threats made to sea turtles that are specific to the state of Texas. This plan does not have a list of threats and conservation goals that are specific to those threats.
The state of Florida has developed a conservation plan that only addresses sea turtles. This plan describes permit information that citizens can have to handle sea turtles, the conservation programs that these permit holders participate in and educational activities to promote sea turtle conservation. This plan does not directly address the threats to these specific species and how these threats can be overcome. The Texas plan should focus on directly addressing the threats to sea turtles and specific management practices to counter these threats.
Even though all these states have different habitats and different sea turtle species nesting on their shores, every state should have similar guidelines. The Comprehensive Wildlife Strategies for Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana all have the same elements that have been voted on by Congress. Although the elements in the plans provide for concrete management goals for each species, they provide guidelines for the states’ specific habitats. A new set of guidelines should be developed that can directly address specific species and their threats. The Texas and Florida plans have common method of concentrating on specific species. If these two methods were put together, having the same guidelines and concentrating on specific species and threats, then each state would have plans that can be carried out more efficiently.
A beach full of young sea turtles making their way towards the ocean can be seen during the breeding season. These sea turtles make it to their final home and when it comes time to breed again, some of these sea turtles will come back to this very beach to continue this cycle. This cycle is made possible by the regulations that are in place protecting sea turtles and other endangered species just like them. The ESA has been successful at increasing the populations of many threatened and endangered species. However, the ESA can improve in two critical ways, making current biology and threats to species a required element in the recovery plans and not allowing economics to be in consideration of the listing and recovery plans of species. In addition to the ESA regulations, states have conservation plans to protect species. These are more specific plans that deal with the habitats of the state and are more detailed. However, to improve these state conservation plans, states should be bold enough to identify specific threats to each species to guard against. With these regulation improvements, the populations of sea turtles and other threatened and endangered species will increase. The success of these species depends on the improvements of these regulations.







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