A Sierra Club chapter in Texas has launched a petition drive in a bid to raise concerns over the direction of the sea turtle program at Padre Island National Seashore.
The Lone Star chapter, based in Austin, wants to know why the National Park Service has cut the program run by 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.
In 2020 in a 51-page report that reviewed the Sea Turtle Science and Recovery Program, or STSR, the National Park Service 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.
The Sierra Club chapter, with 20,000 members, is behind a petition to be sent to Shannon Estenoz, the assistant Interior Secretary for Fish, Wildlife, and Parks, asking that she meet with club leaders to explain what's going on with the program.
Craig Nazor, chair of the chapter, says he wants to be able to tell Estenoz the problems that they see with the program. Those problems, he told a Corpus Christi television station, range from reductions in the number of public turtle hatchling releases to funds that were earmarked for the turtle program being diverted elsewhere.
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Comments
I'm all for helping to protect sea turtles but $1.9 million annually seems insane for a single species. Per the article the main resource management division gets less the $250k annually. The resource managment division is responsible for all other aspects of natural and cultural resources in the park, including aquatic and terrestrial wildlife, botany and invasive plant management, oil and gas site restoration, environmental compliance and planning, archeological site management, and marine debris, just to name a few.
It just seems ridiculous that people think that the park isn’t spending enough money on sea turtles. When in reality it looks like they are spending way too much while the rest of the park suffers.
Reintroduction of Kemp's ridley to Padre Island National Seashore was part of the U.S.-Mexico Kemp's Ridley Restoration and Enhancement Program initiated in 1978.
See:
Kemp’s Ridley Sea Turtle (Lepidochelys kempii) Head-Start and Reintroduction to Padre Island National Seashore, Texas
https://www.herpconbio.org/Volume_10/Symposium/Caillouet_etal_2015.pdf
Reintroduction of Kemp’s Ridley (Lepidochelys kempii) sea turtle to Padre island national seashore, Texas and its connection to head-starting
https://www.herpconbio.org/Volume_10/Symposium/Shaver_caillouet_2015.pdf
See also:
Park Service Slashes Sea Turtle Rescue Program Jul 16, 2020
https://peer.org/park-service-slashes-sea-turtle-rescue-program/
$1.9 million may be a lot, but the park received multiple base funding increases specifically for the sea turtle program and the program director hustled to get soft (short term) funds to supplement. The program should continue to get the base funding and the director should be supported in efforts to continue to get soft funding via competitive proposals. It should be up to her. She and her program should not be penalized for 40 years of success. The other divisions can seek funding as well, and the superintendent should be working to obtain funds to make up shortfalls in other programs. There are really good reasons for the turtle program to have all that money. There are equally good reasons other programs are short. It is lazy and pathetic that the superintendent and other division chiefs would rather steal sea turtle funds than hustle after funds their own funding.
People should also be aware that the sea turtle program brings thousands of visitors to the park for the hatchling releases. The program supports interpretive programs about the turtles. Most of all Padre Island has become a key factor in recovery for multiple endangered turtle species, particularly Kemp's ridley. Instead of penalizing the turtle program, maybe the superintendent and other division chiefs should be fired for not building the other park programs and for not working with the sea turtle program on supportive efforts. The problem is not the funding or success of the turtle program but laziness and incompetence in other programs. A good superintendent would see this, support the turtle program, and work with other division chiefs to overcome shortfalls. This superintendent would rather target a successful program and retaliate against its director for their success in order to appease his masters.
In fact, more than a total of $2mil went to the sea turtle program at PAIS, in 2019, 20, 21 and 22, according to the NPS review, even though only 1% of Kemp's ridley nests are found in Texas (nearly all are found in Mexico). That's over $10,000 per nest found annually in PAIS. According to Larry McKinney (Senior Director of the Harte Marine Reasearch Institute in Corpus Christi, Texas) Viagra has done more than anything else to restore the Kemp's ridley population. That's because nest robbers in mexico used to rob the Kemp's ridley nests by the hundreds of thousands to seel the eggs for over a dollar eash to men who (falsely) believed the eggs would give them virility and potency. After Viagra was invented in the late 1980's and widespread commercials and billboards in Mexico promoted viagra as the real solution, and laws in Mexico developed hash penalties for taking the eggs, the plundering came to nearly a complete halt.
Here are the Padre Island National Seashore’s answers to the questions that falsely allege the Sea Turtle program is being reduced.
Frequently Asked Questions
Review of the Padre Island National Seashore Sea Turtle Science and Recovery Program
Are you cutting the program’s budget?
• No cuts to the sea turtle program's base budget are planned or have been enacted. The National Park Service review underscores the importance of the sea turtle program at Padre Island and outlines goals to strengthen its mission and expand opportunities for shared stewardship. We want to broaden the success of the sea turtle program to the park’s other resources for their protection and for the enjoyment of our visitors.
Has the program already lost funding?
• No base funding has been lost. At present, the sea turtle program constitutes nearly one quarter of the park's entire base budget (23.8 percent, $1,374,902 annually) -- that is nearly double the average for resource management programs (12.5 percent) across the National Park
Service. The program also secures about $500,000 - $800,000 in project funds each year to support turtle work. These project funds routinely fluctuate based on the success of project submissions
Is the National Park Service curtailing its employees’ speech regarding this review?
• The National Park Service relies heavily on the expertise, dedication, and passion of its employees. To ensure we are responsive to the public and to members of the press, parks have standard operating procedures for coordinating, vetting, and confirming those responses through public information officers at parks or the park superintendent.
Which of the review’s recommendations is the park currently pursuing?
• Some recommendations will require careful study and public feedback before deciding when, or if, they should be implemented; however, several others are opportunities to implement agency best practices. We believe that by scaling back overtime, strategically hiring seasonal employees, and focusing our future research we have updated the program to better align with National Park Service practices and conservation principles.
How can you proceed with any of these recommendations without violating the Endangered Species Act?
• No changes to the park's nest management program have been implemented. Any changes to the program with the potential to impact ESA-listed species must be reviewed by the Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) and would require FWS to issue a biological opinion and any necessary permits.
https://www.nps.gov/.../20_PAIS_Superintendent-FAQs.pdf
https://www.nps.gov/.../management/sea-turtle-review.htm
Human nest robbing is not the only threat to Kemp's ridley sea turtle. Kemp's ridley populations in the Gulf of Mexico increased until 2010 and the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill, but have since stagnated. The three-year-late USFW Service five-year report (just released) says they have not yet recovered.
A competitive grant of $300,000 to the Sea Turtle Science and Recovery (STSR) program earned by Dr. Shaver was forced to be spent elsewhere by the PAIS park administration. Why is that? No answer has been given, despite the complaints that the program is too expensive.
And Kemp's ridley sea turtle is not the only beneficiary of the STSR program. Public turtle releases (and the normal yearly 25 has now been reduced to 5, which is apparently not a "cut") attract 1,000 to 2,000 attendees each. Since the releases happen early in the morning, many of these attendees spend the night in a Corpus Christi hotel, eating dinner and breakfast at local restaurants. This is worth over a million dollars per year to the local economy. There was also an excellent education program associated with the releaes, and delivered by Dr. Shaver, which has also been eliminated. This is not a "cut" either, apparently. The volunteer "turtle patrols" that used to be on the beach regularly during the summer season provided security to a 60 plus mile long park with one entrance at the north end and very little cell phone service throughout the park. The park has instead gone to fewer, and much more expensive, part-time workers. If the problem was really money, why were volunteers nixed?
As the article states, what we have asked for from the NPS is an honest discussion and answers to our questions about the future of the program, which, after hours of meetings with the NPS, WE HAVE NOT RECEIVED. Robert Algeo's post above has more information in it than we have received from the PAIS Superintendent. Why is that?
The federal tax money from all of us pay the salaries of NPS employees. Shouldn't the local community be able to get answers to their questions?
If you agree with us, please sign our petition!