Texas’ official sea turtle far below historical numbers
The nesting season for the endangered Kemp’s ridley sea turtle is ending with zero nests found on either Galveston Island or the Bolivar Peninsula for the first time in at least a decade, although the number rose for the entire coast. The decline in nesting on the Upper Texas Gulf Coast comes as a recent study shows that the nest numbers for Texas’ official sea turtle, whose primary nesting grounds are in Texas and Mexico, are at less than one-tenth of their historic levels. Only five Kemp’s ridley nests were found on the upper Texas coast – four at Surfside and one at Quintana Beach – during the nesting season that runs from April until the middle of July, although there are always a few late nesters. “We’ve had some extremely high tides and a lot of flooding this year, and many times the ocean was right up to the base of the dune,” which could have discouraged turtles from digging nests, said Christopher Marshall, lead turtle researcher at Texas A&M University at Galveston. Nesting numbers were up for the entire Texas Gulf Coast and at the main nesting grounds in Tamaulipas, Mexico, near the Texas border. But scientists and conservationists remain concerned that the increases are far below those prior to the 2010 BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the worst oil spill in U.S. history. Click the link to read more…
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Who’s Who…
August Friedrich Schweigger (1783 – 1821) was a German naturalist. He studied medicine, zoology and botany at Erlangen, and following graduation spent time in Berlin and Paris. In 1809 he was appointed professor of botany and medicine at the University of Königsberg. In 1815, he was elected a corresponding member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. On a research trip to Sicily, he was murdered near Agrigento on 28 June 1821. The plant genus Schweiggeria from the family Violaceae is named in his honor. In the scientific field of herpetology, he is best known for his 1812 monograph of turtles, in which he described several new species which are still valid. These include the Aldabra giant tortoise, Geochelone gigantea the Big-headed Amazon River turtle, Peltocephalus dumerilianus and many others.
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Photo from Courtney Sacco, Associated Press .
