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Heading to the sea at Padre Island National Seashore/Rebecca Latson

Traveler Special Report

Is Padre Island National Seashore's Renowned Sea Turtle Program Slipping Away?

By Kurt Repanshek

They arrive in crowds, sometimes numbering 1,000 or more, rising before the sun to stand behind yellow tape lines, straining their necks and angling for the best possible photo of the newest members of an ancient species. Measuring barely 2 inches across, the Kemp's ridley sea turtle hatchlings shuffle into the Gulf of Mexico surf. Along the way, females somehow imprint the beach in their memory for a possible return a dozen years later to lay their own eggs.

It has been one of the most popular public events the National Park Service offers, drawing young and old both to marvel at the tiny, armored hatchlings in their seaward shuffle and to gain a crash course in the conservation of a species that has narrowly avoided extinction and remains highly endangered. In 2019, before Covid-19 shuttered the public hatchling releases at Padre Island National Seashore on the Gulf Coast of Texas, an estimated 16,000 people viewed the releases; last year, online video presentations of the events reached about 1 million.

Yet despite the strong conservation value of these events -- not just in public education but in the tens of thousands of hatched turtles released to the ocean -- the national seashore's Sea Turtle Science and Recovery Program itself is endangered. For after the Park Service recruited Dr. Donna Shaver -- a sea turtle biologist whose Student Conservation Association intern stint at Padre Island in 1980 launched a career that took her from the Park Service to former Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt's short-lived National Biological Survey and back to the Park Service at Padre Island in 2003 -- to build that sea turtle science program, a role that saw her lift it to international prominence, the agency now appears to be squandering her success and hoping she'll retire.

Nurturing Conservation

Across the National Park System, there occasionally are wildlife programs that catch fire with the public: Yellowstone National Park's wolf recovery program in Wyoming continues to do just that nearly three decades after it was launched, whale watching off Cape Cod National Seashore in Massachusetts typically is part of a beach vacation there, and bugling elk are celebrated with a festival at Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado.

Padre Island's sea turtle program enjoys similar cachet, drawing nearly 65,000 likes to its Facebook page, annually attracting national media attention when nests of up to 100 eggs are laid and again when they hatch six or seven weeks later, and even gaining promotion in regional summer vacation pitches. It's the kind of attention that builds public support for the parks, generates charitable donations, and just might spur youngsters to take up science for a career, possibly with the Park Service.

“If they’re watching it [hatchling releases] happen, that’s a powerful visitor experience. And you’re building support for the Park Service, for endangered species protection, not just sea turtles at Padre Island,” said Mike Murray, who during his time as superintendent of Cape Hatteras National Seashore helped craft beach driving regulations there on the Outer Banks of North Carolina with an eye towards protecting nesting sea turtles and shorebirds. “It’s an incredibly powerful program.”

Indeed, the Padre Island program motivated a Boy Scout to collect turtle egg carriers for the program as part of an Eagle Scout project, and Alex Troutman, a Black who in 2019 worked as a biological science technician for Shaver, was motivated by the work to get more Black, Indigenous, or person of color undergraduate students involved in sea turtle work through seeturtles.org.

Dr. Donna Shaver, releasing hatchlings in 2017, raised public interest in sea turtles and conservation through hatchling release events/Rebecca Latson

But last summer the Park Service, in a 51-page report that reviewed the Sea Turtle Science and Recovery Program, or STSR, said the program had gotten unwieldly and too costly at roughly $1.9 million per year. Within 3-5 years, the review added without any detail, the program would be unsustainable. As a result, it should be tightly reined in, the report recommended.

The program, the review implied, suffered from mission creep while the national seashore's other natural resource programs suffered with an annual $248,670 budget, combined.

That review has raised questions -- many the Park Service refuses to answer -- about the drivers behind the report and its conclusions, which at times seem contradictory in the narrative. While calling for tighter controls over the STSR program, its operations and budget, the report applauds its successes and value, noting that it has "greatly influenced the success of Kemp's ridley sea turtle conservation in Texas and in the Gulf of Mexico."

"Research conducted at the park has been included in many peer-reviewed publications and former (Padre Island) STSR seasonal staff have become prominent researchers and managers working on marine conservation," it adds.

The Park Service has prohibited Shaver from discussing the review, and its fallout has led her to file formal accusations with the agency that Padre Island Superintendent Eric Brunnemann has harassed her verbally and left her out of key sea turtle meetings in hopes she'd quit the agency.

For his part, Brunnemann was not made available by the Park Service to respond to these allegations or his vision for the program. But the situation he finds himself in at Padre Island sounds similar to one when he was superintendent at Badlands National Park in South Dakota.

Brian Kenner, a former Park Service natural resources division chief at Badlands who worked under Brunnemann there, was placed on indefinite administrative leave by Brunneman over what Kenner claims were retaliation for differences over resource management issues, particularly with the park's bison program and wildland fire safety. After almost two years, and after involvement with the Interior Department's solicitor's office, Kenner held onto his job with full pay. 

"My experience with Brunnemann is he doesn't do anything unless he is told to do it from above," Kenner said during a phone call. "I couldn't get him to make a simple decision without calling the regional office. I spent two years on administrative leave that Brunnemann put me on. Ostensibly because I was a threat to him and his staff, was what the letter said." 

At Badlands the superintendent had "absolutely no interest" in the successful black-footed ferret recovery program, said Kenner, who saw funding for efforts to bolster numbers of the highly endangered animal continually cut. 

"It wasn't anything illegal," Kenner said. "It was just he didn't care about it; he didn't prioritize it." 

Kenner, who just published a book about his experiences at Badlands [Hard Lessons In a Hard Land: How One National Park Service Employee's Experience Reflects The State of The Agency And Our Divided Country],sees similarities in what happened at Badlands with reduced funding for the ferret program and what is happening at Padre Island.

"The Park Service recruited her back specifically for this turtle program, put up a big sign out about the Padre Island sea turtle restoration program. She was able to go after all sorts of funding. She effectively got funding and she did a lot of good work, and brought a lot of good press to the park," he said. "She was doing what she thought was best, and it was expensive. There was a lot of overtime, but I think there are just a lot of problems within the turtle world of her spending so much money on this."

The review findings at Padre Island, said Kenner, seemed "slanted" and "it was very suspicious."

"At that time, Brunnemann was brought to the park, and he immediately started crimping her," he said. "So, I think it goes to this review. My experience with government reviews, they're predetermined. They're basically, 'OK, we want to find fault with this program and pull money out of it, so let's do a review and come up with that. And then OK, now we got that, now we'll bring a superintendent in here to get it done.'"

Kenner said Brunnemann when he was at Badlands told him to "'stop talking about bison because I've been told if you don't it's my head.' Shortly thereafter I went on admin leave."

At Padre Island, Brunnemann was named acting superintendent in October 2019 and got the permanent job in March 2020. He soon diverted about $300,000 Shaver's program received through competitive Park Service grants and supposedly used it elsewhere in the park. 

Commitment To Endangered And Threatened Species

A cloud has been dropped over the highly praised and prominent program Shaver has nurtured the past 28 years, but it also has raised questions about the Park Service's commitment to not only the most endangered sea turtle species in the world's oceans but to other turtle species found on the Endangered Species List that rely on the seashore’s beaches and waters.

Just about 1 percent of the Kemp's ridley nesting takes place at Padre Island National Seashore. Since 1979, the seashore's turtle program has released about 180,000 hatchlings into the gulf/Rebecca Latson

Does the Park Service in the Intermountain Region have a point about the growth of the Padre Island turtle program? It involves only about 1 percent of the world's Kemp's ridley nesting grounds, and the budget is nearly one-quarter of the entire seashore operations budget and dwarfs the budget for Padre Island's Science and Resources Management division, where programs go wanting for funds.

"The park has many important and internationally significant natural and cultural resources that are not being monitored, studied, or managed. For example, the park provides habitat for more than 300 bird species, it contains 16th century Spanish shipwrecks, and there are thousands of acres of prairie, dune habitat, and freshwater marshes," the review noted, implying that the STRS itself and not the NPS budgeting process has deprived those programs. "The Laguna Madre within (Padre Island) is considered one of only about 6 hyper-saline lagoons in the world, where close to 80 percent of all redhead ducks winter in the U.S., about 80 percent of all seagrass beds occur in the entire state of Texas, and where federally- and state-listed migratory bird species find important habitat."

Nonetheless, the picture that emerges from the review questions how committed the Park Service is, at Padre Island at least, to conserving threatened and endangered species. While the report notes the high profile and many successes of the program, it also notes that many of its operations (such as removing eggs from nests to incubate them) are not supported by recovery plans, biological opinions, or even Park Service policies pertaining to allowing natural processes to proceed.

Indeed, "(T)he review found no programmatic (biological opinion) exists for the park’s sea turtle program," the review stated.

Padre Island, Turtle Central

Though the diminutive Kemp's ridley turtles call the entire Gulf of Mexico home, Padre Island dominates their nesting in U.S. waters, "making it the most important nesting beach in the United States for this endangered species," the Park Service's review of Shaver's program stated.

Indeed, in the 1980s the national seashore was specifically chosen by international experts to develop a satellite nesting population of Kemp's ridley turtles that could both contribute to global recovery and serve as a backup population in case a disaster hit the Mexican populations, which are largely centered around Playa de Rancho Nuevo at Tamaulipas. Too, the Padre Island work was seen as a way to develop protocols for a captive breeding program, if ever needed.

Kemp's ridley eggs are taking from nests and placed into an incubation center to protect them from beaching driving and predators/NPS

As the Deepwater Horizon incident demonstrated, having one population center for Kemp's ridleys is risky.

"Because the Kemp’s ridley has one primary nesting beach, this species is particularly susceptible to habitat destruction by natural (e.g., hurricanes) and human caused events," the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service noted in 2015 in its 5-year status review of the species. "Human caused threats include the potential for oil spills, especially in the Gulf of Mexico since it is an area of high-density offshore oil exploration and extraction. British Petroleum’s Deepwater Horizon oil spill occurred in 2010, and the short and long-term impacts to sea turtles as a result of habitat impacts, prey loss, and subsurface oil components broken down through physical, chemical, and biological processes are unknown. However, observations of oil and other pollutants have been found within major foraging 25 grounds for Kemp’s ridleys."

Padre Island also is the only area in Texas where all five threatened and endangered species of sea turtles -- Kemp's ridley, Green, Loggerhead, Leatherback, and Hawksbill -- nest or rely on habitat in the seashore. And yet, the Park Service review said the Padre Island staff should ignore all but Kemp's ridley turtles with its work. That appears to run counter to the agreement the Park Service signed with Shaver in 2003 when it recruited her to run the program. Under it, Shaver was given authority to "supervise all sea turtle work," not just that focused on Kemp's ridley turtles. 

"The STRM Division would work exclusively on sea turtles (sic) projects and publications, full-time, year-round," it added. "Projects and programs would include all sea turtle monitoring, research, management, conservation, restoration, protection, and technical assistance-type of duties associated with sea turtle projects at Padre Island. This integrated program would also include an extensive public education component, state and federal agency partnership component, media contact component, and an outreach component.

"Dr. Shaver would be responsible for all STRM Division budgetary, personnel, and administration functions."

Last year's review amounts to shredding of that agreement, as it:

  • Gives the park superintendent budgetary and personnel oversight;
  • Restricts Shaver's division to working within the national seashore's boundaries, even though she has served as Texas' coordinator for Sea Turtle Stranding and Salvage Network, a role that came into prominent play in February with a mass cold-stunning event of sea turtles along the Gulf Coast;
  • Prohibits the division from working to help Green and Loggerhead sea turtles, two threatened species that also nest at Padre Island;
  • Suggests a reduction in its Kemp's ridley turtle egg incubation program, and;
  • Reduces the number of public events around the release of hatchlings.

The report went further, directing that grant funds for species other than Kemp's ridley turtles should not be pursued, saying the STSR program should prepare for a 30 percent reduction in funding, and directing that annual overtime pay, which reached $201,232 in Fiscal 2019, should be held to no more than $16,500. 

The Park Service review gave cover for Brunnemann's diversion of roughly $300,000 for Green sea turtle research, noting that, "(I)n addition to all Kemp’s ridley nests, the park protects, collects, and incubates eggs from all Green and Loggerhead sea turtles. Green and Loggerhead sea turtle eggs collected at Padre Island, and those collected elsewhere along the Texas coast and sent to the park, are incubated at the park and the hatchlings are released on park beaches. There seems to be no conservation reason to maintain this practice, and no EA [environmental assessment], BO [biological opinion], or other directive exists to support this management action." 

Threatened green sea turtles occasionally nest on the national seashore, too/NPS

Threatened Green sea turtles occasionally nest on the national seashore, too/NPS

But that section doesn't entirely jibe with the position espoused by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

"Padre Island National Seashore is important to sea turtles simply because it's a remote, undeveloped barrier island," Mary Skoruppa, the USFWS's Sea Turtle Coordinator for the Texas Coast, told the Traveler during a call. "It’s important to sea turtles just because of its proximity and because of the federally protected land, a lot of federal protected beach which is important sea turtle habitat for nesting. Of course, the turtles that strand and are injured and wash up on the beach need to be rescued. It doesn’t matter what species, it’s important to all of them."

Brunnemann's position that Shaver's program has no "NPS biological or environmental justification" to be working with Green or Loggerhead turtles also seems to conflict with the position of the FWS because of their status as threatened species.

"Green sea turtles are increasing in Texas," said Skoruppa. "We’ve got plenty of justification for Green sea turtles to be protected and conservation focused on them as well.”

Any research that Shaver's team conducts on those species "is going to help the Fish and Wildlife Service with recovery and conservation of the species," she added.

Dr. Charles Caillouet, a retired fisheries biologist who worked with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, had a particular field of study involving Kemp's ridley sea turtles, and authored papers with Shaver, said it would be a mistake for the Park Service to reduce the program's base funding and to discourage her from seeking grants to support her work with the turtle species found at Padre Island.

"NPS should encourage (rather than reject) outside funding as a supplement to continued and increased base funding for the (program) at Padre Island. Dr. Shaver’s having applied for and received outside funding exemplifies her high standing as a scientist, which also reflects positively on NPS," Caillouet wrote in an email. "However, NPS’s base funding is essential, as it has been for the 40 years that Dr. Shaver has been contributing to sea turtle conservation and research at Padre Island, Texas, and the Gulf of Mexico.

"If NPS is concerned about funding, it should hold a scientific workshop or symposium, and invite sea turtle scientists and conservationists from non-government organizations and universities to examine and evaluate the program at Padre Island, as other agencies (e.g., NOAA, NMFS, and USFWS) have done in the past with their sea turtle science and recovery programs. Such evaluations provide addition perspective that otherwise is not available within federal government agencies."  

The NPS report's adoption was recommended by Patrick Malone, the Intermountain Region's chief for Natural Resources, and seconded by Jennifer Carpenter, associate regional director for Resource Stewardship and Science. The regional director, Mike Reynolds, approved it.

None of those individuals would agree to an interview. Instead, the Park Service issued the following response to the Traveler's request: 

The NPS completed our first comprehensive review of the Sea Turtle Science and Recovery program in its 40-year history, looking for ways to strengthen the program's efficacy, efficiency and support for program staff. The review of the program underscores the importance of the Kemp's ridley sea turtle program at Padre Island National Seashore. 

In the program review, we found several opportunities to strengthen the program and increase support for other important resources in the park through increased partnerships and shared stewardship with the partners we already have. To clarify, the review does not make or implement any decisions, nor does the review enact any cuts to the sea turtle program's base budget.

Among the questions not answered by the Park Service were why it seemingly rescinded the original agreement it signed with Shaver in 2003 and whether it goes against the Park Service's conservation mission to have the national seashore ignore Green and Loggerhead turtles within its boundaries. Nor did the agency say how it was strengthening the program.

Too, while the NPS response to Traveler's inquiries said the review does not make or implement any decisions, why did Brunnemann already divert nearly $300,000 in grant funds Shaver won for Green turtle work, and where did the money go?

Also, why did the Park Service not let Shaver review the report before it was publicly released? There also was concern raised by a National Marine Fisheries Service expert that her input "was mischaracterized and required clarification." In one case, she corrected the report's statement that there was "no conservation benefit" to efforts the Padre Island program put into mass strandings of turtles, saying it was "not a blanket statement about the current level of effort" but rather specific to measuring and tagging every turtle rescued.

Professional Concerns

Padre Island National Seashore's sea turtle work for four decades has been both valuable and unique from that done at other seashores in the park system. As Kemp's ridley is the most endangered of sea turtle species, work to build their numbers is invaluable. The fact that the state of Texas views its beaches as, for all intents and purposes, roads open 24 hours a day, makes sea turtles and their nests at Padre Island particularly vulnerable to being run over. And the practice of excavating Kemp's ridley nests and incubating their eggs is unique to the park system.

Some outside experts were puzzled by the Park Service's actions.

"Simply put, I feel that the Padre Island Kemp’s cohort is critically important to ensure this taxon’s future survival if some catastrophe should befall the Mexican nesting beach," Dr. Patrick Burchfield, director of the Gladys Porter Zoo in Brownsville, Texas, and U.S. coordinator of the bi-national multi-agency Kemp’s Ridley Sea Turtle Restoration & Enhancement Project in Mexico, told SWOT, a partnership among Oceanic Society, the IUCN-SSC Marine Turtle Specialist Group, Duke University's OBIS-SEAMAP, last August in the wake of the NPS report.

"... (w)ith the exception of one season when sand moisture was excessive, the hatchery at (Padre Island) has matched or exceeded the percentage of hatching success in facsimile nests in beach corrals in Mexico," Dr. Burchfield added. "The (Padre Island) program has since monitored and learned to manage their hatchery temperatures and hatchling sex ratios, and has honed this to an exact science that would even allow us to create more males in the laboratory if that becomes a problem in the future due to global warming and female-skewed populations."

Since the program began at Padre Island in 1978, more than 180,000 hatchlings have been released into the Gulf of Mexico/Rebecca Latson

For four decades Padre Island National Seashore's sea turtle program has been releasing Kemp's ridley hatchlings into the Gulf of Mexico/Rebecca Latson

Understandably concerned by the Park Service review was Caillouet.

"The National Park Service must have had good reasons for funding the Sea Turtle Science and Recovery Program at Padre Island during the four decades before 2020, perhaps because this program was so successful and popular, and made so many important contributions to sea turtle conservation and science, not only in Texas but throughout the Gulf of Mexico," Caillouet said in his email. "Padre Island's sea turtle work is especially popular with the general public and media, and it has been widely acclaimed. Dr. Shaver is an award-winning conservationist and scientist. The sea turtle program at Padre Island also has contributed to Green turtle (Chelonia mydas) conservation and research; at one time, there was a major Green turtle fishery in Texas, and it decimated the Green turtle population. Dr. Shaver’s efforts have led to increased numbers of juvenile Green turtles as well as nestings of Green turtles on Texas beaches."

To diminish the program because only 1 percent Kemp's ridley nesting takes place at Padre Island is "short-sighted," he said.

"In my opinion, the more Kemp’s ridley nesting colonies the better if Kemp’s ridley is to survive as a species, especially in the context of global warming and sea level rise," the biologist said. "The idea to restore Kemp’s ridley nesting at Padre Island originated within NPS, and NPS played a central role in its early planning. Other agencies in Mexico and the U.S. joined the planning and participated in implementation."

While the Park Service review questioned the practice of taking Kemp's ridley eggs from nests and incubating them, and suggested more emphasis on erecting "corrals" around nests in some areas of the national seashore to protect them in place, Caillouet said the species' population trends are tenuous and justified the program's current approach to hatchling success with an eye towards increasing the numbers of turtles that return to Padre Island to nest.

"According to the US-Mexico Kemp’s Ridley Recovery Plan, the Kemp’s ridley population, as indexed by the annual nest count on selected Tamaulipas beaches, was growing at the phenomenal rate of 19 percent per year in 2009.  In 2010, the nest count dropped by more than one-third, and has fluctuated widely from year to year ever since, but it has remained below the threshold for downlisting Kemp’s ridley from endangered to threatened status," he pointed out. "The cause or causes of this persisting nesting setback have not yet been determined with certainty, but it is clear that the population is no longer increasing. The Deepwater Horizon oil spill occurred in the northern Gulf of Mexico in 2010. There are signs that Gulf of Mexico carrying capacity for the Kemp’s ridley population has declined.

"... Incubation of sea turtle clutches of any and all species of sea turtles that nest on Padre Island beaches are prudent conservation interventions. Sea turtles exhibit nesting site fidelity, so if sea turtles of various species are nesting on Padre Island beaches, they likely originated there," explained Caillouet. "Sea turtles are among the natural biota of Padre Island. The same goes for the various species that nest elsewhere on the Texas coast as well as coasts of other states along the Gulf of Mexico. Sea turtle populations are recovering within the Gulf of Mexico, but none have recovered." 

A nesting Kemp's ridley sea turtle at Padre Island National Seashore/NPS

At the Turtle Foundation, which works globally to protect sea turtles, Reisa Latorra struggled to understand the Park Service's rationale for diminishing Shaver's work.

"The review seems to have some internal inconsistencies, such as pointing out that the park allows year-round driving on the beach and that Kemp's ridleys nest during the day, both indicating the necessity of moving the nests to hatching facilities, and then subsequently saying that the park should allow in-situ nesting like other NPS units," Latorra, president of the organization's U.S. operations, told the Traveler in an email. "I do not know what the impediment is to disallowing driving on the beach, but that seems like it might be a good step toward allowing an in-situ nesting beach management plan.

"In any case, there is no argument that the Padre Island sea turtle program has been an amazing success story, with North Padre Island being the single biggest nesting site of Kemp's in the U.S.," she added. "Since one of the goals was to establish a satellite population of Kemp's ridleys at (Padre Island) that could contribute to global recovery of the species, it seems prudent to continue to support the program in every way possible. It also makes no sense to me to not allow the rescue of stranded sea turtles outside the park boundaries, unless that falls under the jurisdiction of another organization that would implement those rescues.

"Sea turtles do not recognize park boundaries, for either stranding or nesting. And I don't understand not allowing applications for federal funding. This is a multi-agency, international, wildly successful conservation project -- exactly the type of project that should have the backing of federal conservation dollars," Latorra said.

Also somewhat perplexed by the Park Service's report is Murray, the former Cape Hatteras superintendent who in the early 2000s oversaw prickly negotiations to implement a beach driving plan that would protect both nesting sea turtles and birds such as the threatened piping plover. (Traveler's examination of that issue can be found here and here.)

Murray, now a member of the Coalition to Protect America's National Parks, said Padre Island's turtle situation differed "like night vs. day" from that at Cape Hatteras because Kemp's ridley turtles nest during the day and because beach driving is allowed around the clock at Padre Island while the Cape Hatteras plan bans night beach driving.

"It's an endangered species that's not well protected in most of its nesting range, so Padre Island is a particularly important nesting area for it," he said of Kemp’s ridleys.

"(Shaver) has combined a very effective science program to increase the survival rate of hatchlings, which helps with recovery of the species, with kind of a public education component," Murray added during a phone call. "That’s pretty rare, to do that so well."

While the report on the STSM program questioned the intensive management techniques around egg incubation and whether it was justified, Murray pointed out that the Park Service took an intensive approach to returning wolves to Yellowstone and with boosting the population of American crocodiles at Everglades National Park.

"I worked at the Everglades way back when American crocodiles were first listed, and the scientists were removing eggs from nests, incubating them, then releasing the hatchlings back at the nest site," he recalled. "Those are all considered I think extraordinary measures to help with species that may be on the brink of, maybe not world-wide extinction but local extirpation. Fancy word, but they no longer are viable reproducing species in an area where they traditionally have roamed and lived and reproduced.

“But the goal of all those kinds of programs that I’m familiar with usually have been to help the species on its road to recovery, but then get back to a normal, unassisted reproduction program."

Kemp's ridley sea turtles are far from boasting a viable, unassisted reproduction, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's most recent five-year review of the species' status, released in 2015. That plan stated that a population of "at least 10,000 nesting females" was needed to consider downlisting the species from endangered to threatened, yet there were only 4,395 nesting females estimated in 2014.

At the Sea Turtle Conservancy, Executive Director David Godfrey had no first-hand knowledge of the Padre Island review, but wasn't taken back by the NPS recommendations for the program.

"Most of the global sea turtle conservation community long ago moved past the idea that saving sea turtles requires hatcheries at every nesting beach as a necessary part of the reproductive process," he said in an email. "It is usually a healthy thing in conservation, as in most long-term initiatives, to adaptively manage programs, reassess strategies, review what has worked and what hasn’t, and ensure the most efficient use of resources."

Awaiting The Outcome  

The outcome of the report remains to be seen, as the Park Service hasn't made a specific proposal for the Fish and Wildlife Service to consider.

But the stress of the whole episode has weighed heavily on Shaver, whose work has seen her honored in 2012 with the National Park Service director's award for Natural Resource Research, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service 2013 Endangered Species Recovery Champion Award, and in 2018 the Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Sea Turtle Society. She also was a 2020 finalist for a "Sammie," or Service to America, award in the science and environment category.

In a recent email to friends and colleagues she wrote that, "I hoped, prayed, and naively thought that someone would come in and save me and stop this senseless, destructive, heartless, unscientific...attack on a program that the NPS told me they started, loved, and would support if I returned to them from the USGS and brought the turtle program back with me. But no one has come to save me."

A Diminutive Turtle With Long Odds

 By Robert Janiskee

The Kemp's ridley may be little as sea turtles go, measuring only about 2 feet in length and weighing in around 100 pounds, but it has got big problems, as the Traveler's Dr. Robert Janiskee pointed out in a 2010 article. It was already the world's most endangered marine turtle before the mammoth Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico threatened to wreak havoc on its vital habitat.

The Kemp's ridley was named for Key West fisherman Richard M. Kemp, who submitted the type specimens nearly a century ago. In some places this species is also called Atlantic ridley, Gulf ridley, or Mexican ridley.

By whatever name you may call it, Lepidochelys kempi is the smallest of the marine turtles. Its nearly round dorsal shell (carapace) typically measures only 2.0 to 2.5 feet in length, and while some marine turtles tip the scales at well over 700 pounds, few Kemp's ridleys exceed 100 pounds. A close cousin, the olive ridley (L. olivacea), is similarly small.

Although Kemp's ridleys can at times be found at times in some nearshore and inshore waters of the Atlantic as far north as Nova Scotia, and can also be found along Venezuela's coast and in odd places (including the Azores, Morocco, and the Mediterranean Sea), their primary habitat is the northern Gulf of Mexico.

Kemp's ridleys feed in and migrate through and near many national parks along the U.S. Gulf and Atlantic coasts, including Padre Island National Seashore, Gulf Islands National Seashore, Jean Lafitte National Historical Park and Preserve, Dry Tortugas National Park, and Everglades National Park on the Gulf of Mexico, and Biscayne National Park, Cumberland Island National Seashore, and Fire Island National Seashore on the Atlantic Coast.

Individuals spotted in the northerly Atlantic Coast reaches of the range are likely to be current-carried or wandering juveniles or subadults. Mature Kemp's ridleys are characteristically drawn to the rich feeding grounds of the estuaries and shallow inshore or near-shore waters of the Gulf, especially areas near the mouth of the Mississippi River and in Mexico's Campeche region.

Available food, suitable temperatures, and nesting habitat are the key considerations. Kemp's ridleys are shallow water feeders. They mainly feed on crabs (blue crabs are their favorite food), but they also eat clams, oysters, jellyfish, and occasionally fish, seaweed, and sargassum. During feeding and nesting migrations, individuals commonly travel hundreds of miles.

The Kemp's ridley can live as long as 50 years. Females, which are usually at least 10 -12 years old before they begin breeding, have nesting habits strikingly different from other marine turtles. The nesting occurs in broad daylight instead of at night, is heavily concentrated at a single beach instead of scattered among numerous locations, and tends to occur in synchronized fashion with hundreds of females converging on the same beach the same day. Around 95 percent of the females lay their eggs on a single lengthy beach at Rancho Nuevo in the Mexican state of Tamaulipas. Minor nesting sites include Tepehuajes, and Barra del Tordo (both in Tamaulipas), Veracruz (Mexico) and the Texas coast. Rare instances have been reported in North Carolina, South Carolina, and the Gulf and Atlantic coasts of Florida.

At Rancho Nuevo, the undisputed hub of Kemp's ridley reproduction, the beach is the scene of one of nature's more remarkable events. At intervals from late April to early July, females swarm ashore en masse -- "wave upon wave," as some have described it -- laying about 110 eggs in each shallow nest. Females come ashore more than once, at intervals of about 10-28 days, typically laying two or four clutches of eggs in a season. Some females do not nest every year.

It may seem hard to believe today, when the population of nesting-age female Kemp's ridleys is probably not more than 1,000, but episodes involving more than 40,000 individuals coming ashore to nest in a single day were documented at Rancho Nuevo as recently as the late 1940s. These synchronized nestings -- locally known as arribadas (aka arribazones) -- are believed to enhance reproductive success because coyotes, vultures, and other predators (including egg-gathering humans in historic times) are confronted with so many eggs and hatchlings that they can take only a fraction.

Although the synchronized nesting strategy hastened the demise of the passenger pigeon (whose enormous nesting flocks made easy pickings for humans), the startling decline in the Kemp's ridley population that occurred during the 1950s and 1960s cannot be attributed to excessive predation or market hunting. Instead, the main culprits for the post-World War II decline have been commercial fishing, habitat loss, and pollution. By the early 1970s, the Kemp's ridley was in deep, deep trouble.

Drowning or getting seriously injured in shrimp trawls has been, and remains to this day, the principal hazard for Kemp's ridley turtles. Annual losses number at least 500 animals, and since most turtle deaths go unreported, actual losses could easily be ten times that large.

The loss and disturbance of nesting habitat is also a very serious threat, especially since nearly all nesting is concentrated along a single strip of beach on the Mexican coast. Some mortality is due to pollution, including oil spills (fouling, toxic effects) and the ingestion of marine debris. Together, these and other factors put the Kemp's ridley population into a decline so steep that protective measures became necessary and extinction loomed as a distinct possibility.

International efforts in behalf of the Kemp's ridley and other sea turtles have clearly paid dividends. Mexico extended limited protection to the Kemp's ridley in the 1960s, and the U.S. followed with endangered species designation in 1970. Important strides were made in the 1970s when Mexico declared Rancho Nuevo a natural reserve (in 1977) and initiated programs to protect the nesting beach and individual nests, minimize poaching, and reduce the natural mortality of eggs and hatchlings.

The U.S. began partnering with Mexico at Rancho Nuevo in 1978, and the Kemp's ridley recovery campaign in Mexico has since been a bi-national effort. By the late 1990s, the Bi-National Kemp's Ridley Recovery Plan had established seven camps along the Tamaulipas and Veracruz beaches for nest protection, law enforcement, and related activities.

Only time will tell whether the Park Service is making the right decision by scaling back the sea turtle program at Padre Island National Seashore/Rebecca Latson

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Comments

DR. SHAVER'S SEA TURTLE PROGRAM IS UNDER DIRE STRESS. PLEASE HELP US SAVE IT AND WRITE YOUR U.S. CONGRESSMEN. MS. DEB HAALAND, PLEASE HELP US SAVE THE SEA TURTLE PROGRAM.


What program gets to survive untouched for almost 2 decades?  The entitlement by the resource management staff shown here is stunning. NPS leadership should stay the course,


Eric Brunneman is intentionally destroying 4 decades of work with sea turtles in Texas. The science backs up the methods used in Texas as the conditions are different than those in other states. He is doing the same to an internationally acclaimed scientist in Dr. Shaver (he already has her under a gag order hoping she will disobey it). And, he has already effectively stolen $300K from the sea turtle program.

NPS, open your eyes and halt this injustice before it is too late.

ALL ELECTED OFFICIALS - IF NPS LEADERS CAN'T CORRECT THIS,  THEN FIND NEW ONES WHO CAN BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE!


Yeah, I keep saying the same sort of things about the continuing-to-smolder Yellowstone Forever scandal and I just get told that, between too many fish to fry right now, the slimy Senate, the influence of corrupt state political leaders, and delays in getting DOI and DOJ agency personnel in position, I'm supposed to just be patient, sit, and watch.  I miss the old black suburbans.


Isn't Endangered Species usually an USFWS program?  Maybe it is really an issue of who pays for the program? 


This program and personnel are vital to the recovery of the Kemps. Donna Shaver has been treated very badly by the Park Service and we need to support her and the program in anyway we can. Local bussiness owner and fisherman.


Continued program funding should be based on need and success, both of which remain present in this situation. The use of "entitlement" for staff who have dedicated careers to endangered species preservation and are fighting for continued effort is not appropriate. It's natural for programs to be reviewed, and costs re-evaluated, but to suddenly change direction in such a secretive way is inexplicable.    This program has been touted in the past by a Park Service interested in endangered species preservation, but today there does not seem to be that commitment. I learned that lesson with black-footed ferrets. It was popular, successful, and key to ferret survival but the NPS in the last 10-15 years lost interest and consequently it lost funding. That is inexcusable when preserving endangered species. Brunnemann is just the minion sent to destroy the turtle program by higher officials who simply don't support endangered species conservation.


How does this make any sense?? What or who is behind this at the NPS?? Take a perfectly good, world renowned program, not to mention the awesome public relation, and tourism this brings to the National Seashor. Why would you destroy it like this.. Its just Assnine!!! Please someone in the Department of Interior get involved and straighten this wrong out!!


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