Follow up to previous posting, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Undertakes Major Sea Turtle Egg Evacuations In Response to Spill, this New York Times Magazine article, The BP-Spill Baby-Turtle Brigade:
“The hatchlings from this seasons first nests, however, were on schedule to scramble into the Gulf of Mexico only a few months after the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon rig, at what looked to be the height of one of the worst man-made environmental disasters in history. By June, the sargassum in that part of the gulf was heavily oiled. Soon, it appeared to be largely gone: incinerated in controlled burns, maybe, or hauled up by skimmer boats. And so state and federal wildlife agencies came up with a radical plan. Sea-turtle eggs laid on beaches in Alabama and the Florida Panhandle would be dug up during their very last days of incubation, packed into Styrofoam coolers and shipped to a climate-controlled warehouse at the Kennedy Space Center on the opposite coast of Florida. There, after hatching, the baby turtles would be released into the oil-free Atlantic. When I arrived in Alabama in late July, tens of thousands of turtle eggs, from hundreds of nests, were already in the process of being relocated all during a point in their development when even a slight jolt to the egg could be lethal. In short, America was orchestrating the migration of an entire generation of sea turtles, slow and steady, overland, in a specially outfitted FedEx truck. The government called this effort a set of extraordinary measures being taken in direct response to an unprecedented human-caused disaster…Fortunately, a vast and well-organized infrastructure of volunteers was already in place: people who, for years, happened to have been honing some of the very skills that the survival of these imperiled animals suddenly hinged on not because they saw such a crisis coming, but basically because they really loved turtles.”
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