Scientists created zombie ‘Frankenturtles’ to discover why loggerheads are dying – via Herp Digest

By Darryl Fears, Washington Post, 6/29/2016 

The two majestic loggerhead sea turtles were dead, and nothing could change that. Like dozens of their kind, they’d succumbed in the ocean and washed up on Chesapeake Bay beaches, a major concern for marine biologists.

But two researchers had a crazy idea: What if they could bring the giants back to life, so to speak. David Kaplan, a professor at the College of William & Mary’s Virginia Institute of Marine Science, and Bianca Santos, a graduate student there, went to work. They stuffed their body cavities with flotation material, stuck them back in the water and followed their drift in the hopes of finding where loggerheads are encountering the numerous things that are killing them.

The scientists didn’t laugh madly. No electricity flashed between poles in a lab. But make no mistake, some horror was involved. “It’s gruesome,” said Santos. “It’s not the prettiest of topics. But overall it’s been positive.”

They call them Frankenturtles because they look like monsters — zombies with eyes missing and mouths shut tight. Their bodies at launch were still thawing out from the freezer at the Virginia Aquarium’s Stranding Response Program, which collected the two specimens after beachcombers spotted them. Two weeks later, the mission to give their lives purpose is going “pretty well,” Santos said.

Loggerheads are common in the Chesapeake Bay, with up to 10,000 appearing in its waters each summer to feed. But the bay isn’t an easy destination for them. Loggerheads encounter numerous threats across their range and in the bay itself — accidental capture by anglers, entrapment in plastic junk, boat propeller strikes and sudden drops in temperature. Animals also prey greedily on turtle nests and tiny newly hatched loggerheads that die after going astray on their way to the ocean. Those threats collectively are why loggerheads are classified as a threatened species.

Between 200 and 400 a year washed up dead in the Chesapeake Bay region around the turn of the century, Kaplan said. Modifications to fishing nets have reduced that estimate to between 100 and 300 annually today, though scientists worry that the turtles they find are only a fraction of the overall shell count. “The actual number could be much higher,” he said.

Santos recently authored a decay study showing that turtles remain intact only for up to five days after death — with birds, crabs, and fish picking at them — and might disintegrate before drifting to a beach. Of those that get to shore, Kaplan said, “many probably strand in remote or marshy areas where they are unlikely to be observed and reported by a beachgoer.”

The pair figured that if they could pinpoint where some of those threats occur most often, they could create loggerhead safety zones, at least in the bay. So they asked the response team at the aquarium for a dead turtle or two.

The hope was to use global positioning systems to track the floating animals and map where the winds and currents send them from a release point in the bay. “If our model can accurately simulate how winds and currents act on a dead sea turtle, we should be able to backtrack from a stranding site to the place where the turtle likely died,” Santos said. “By knowing the ‘where,’” she added, “we can better look at the ‘why.’”

Before getting to those release points, the team had to create Frankenturtles. Two arrived frozen stiff from the aquarium. One was estimated to be about 20 years old, dead from a boat strike. The other was a juvenile, age not guessed and its death unknown.

The team removed the inner organs, which sounds disgusting but doesn’t even begin to convey how wretched that task was. “In addition to the unforgettable and growing aroma of thawing turtle,” David Malmquist, a marine science institute spokesman said, “the creatures are both heavy and unwieldy.” The larger weighed in at 150 pounds, the smaller at 70 pounds.

The team replaced the organs with Styrofoam. “We cut up some buoys,” Santos said, “…spread some foam, filled the bottom cavity with some foam stuff and some buoys.” The first “actually took us a couple of hours to figure it out.” The second was done in an hour.

“It might seem sort of gross, but it’s a good way to reuse a dead turtle that would otherwise be buried,” Kaplan said. “And hopefully, the deployment of our two Frankenturtles will ultimately help lower the number of turtle deaths in the future.”

Four people were needed to carry them to a truck, unload them on boats and take them to deep water in mid-June. The researchers also built two wooden turtles to simulate drift and equipped those with a GPS. They did the same with a pair of drift buckets. They chose Mob Jack Bay as a release point between the York River and the Eastern Shore.

“They stayed on the surface of the water and drifted along,” about five miles per day, Santos said. “The tracks are still working. We’re hoping to release more, get some more data.”

Florida man stole 107 freshly laid sea turtle eggs buried at the beach, police say – via Herp Digest

By Katie Mettler July 6 2016,Washington Post

A Florida man is accused of stealing more than 100 loggerhead sea turtle eggs from a Jupiter Island beach last week. (Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission)

The tip first came in last week.

Someone had been scouring the Atlantic beaches of Jupiter Island, Fla., state wildlife biologists were told, poaching freshly laid sea turtle eggs buried there in the sand. One stretch of beach in particular was being targeted, officials said, an area behind a coastal home.

Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission officers increased patrols in the area, watching for thieves.

On Friday, officials said, they caught their culprit.

Glenn Robert Shaw, 49, of Tequesta, Fla., was arrested on the beach late Friday night after officers watched him scoop more than 100 eggs from the sand as a female loggerhead sea turtle was laying them, FWC officials said. Shaw was booked into the Palm Beach County Jail on a third-degree felony charge for endangering the protected species. His alleged crime is punishable by up to five years in prison, according to officials, and a fine of up to $5,000.

Authorities kept 15 of the 107 eggs for evidence and DNA testing, then reburied the remaining 92. Officials hope that the recovered eggs, the size and shape of ping-pong balls with a soft white shell, still have a chance to hatch and flourish despite being man-handled and reburied.

“Protecting Florida’s natural resources is something we take seriously and we’re thankful that this individual was prevented from doing further harm to this imperiled species,” FWC Capt. Jeff Ardelean said in a statement, according to the Palm Beach Post.

The illegal sea turtle egg trade is a lucrative business, although not overly common in Florida. Ardelean told CBS12 that FWC has investigated more than 40 cases of sea turtle egg poaching in the same southeast Florida region where Friday’s incident occurred.

Black markets for the eggs have been identified in South Florida, CBS12 reported, including Miami, West Palm Beach and Riviera Beach. The eggs can go for $20 or $30 dollars per dozen, Ardelean told the TV station, depending on the time of year and availability.

Although most countries, including the United States, have laws banning the harvest of sea turtle eggs for food, according to FWC, those regulations are not well enforced.

In some places, sea turtle eggs are prized as an aphrodisiac. In some parts of the Caribbean, Ardelean told CBS12, the sea turtle egg trade is legal.

“Thankfully poaching isn’t a huge concern in the state of Florida,” Sarah Hirsch, a researcher with the Loggerhead Marine Life Center, told the TV station. “We do see it here but we do see it occasionally. We do have a lot of protections here, and we have a lot of great volunteers that are out here looking out for those nests.”

 The loggerhead sea turtle, which on average weighs 200 pounds and is three feet long, was listed as a threatened species in 1978 under the Endangered Species Act, according to U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services. Its nesting season begins in April and lasts through September, with peaks in June and July. The females reach sexual maturity between ages 32 and 35, officials estimate, and return to the beach where they were born to lay their eggs across an average of four nests per season.

In each nest, a loggerhead will deposit about 100 eggs every two weeks. In Florida, it takes those eggs about two months to hatch. Only about one in 1,000 sea turtles survive to adulthood, according to FWC.

Sea turtles are among the oldest creatures on earth and have remained essentially 110 million years, according to the FWC, but egg poaching and other environmental and human hazards cast an uncertain shadow on their future.

Last month, Susan Tellem, founder of World Turtle Day, emphasized in an interview with the Christian Science Monitor the extreme concern conservationists have for the future of sea turtles.

“They outlived the dinosaur,” she said, “and are in danger of disappearing from habitat destruction, the cruel pet trade and live food markets worldwide.”

Stolen sea turtles' eggs fuel illicit market (Loggerhead sea turtles) – via Herp Digest

The Associated Press, Oct. 24, 2015

SAVANNAH, Ga. — Less than two years after he was released from prison, Lewis Jackson found authorities waiting for him as he boarded a ferry boat on remote Sapelo Island while carrying a cooler full of contraband valued by some as a mythical aphrodisiac.

Inside the cooler investigators found plastic bags filled with the ping-pong ball-size eggs of loggerhead sea turtles, reptiles protected by the Endangered Species Act. Stealing eggs of the threatened species is a federal crime.

Jackson was arrested July 7 in coastal Georgia with 84 sea turtle eggs swiped from a turtle nest on the barrier island's unspoiled beach. Authorities knew to look for him because it wasn't his first offense. He had served six months in federal prison for pleading guilty to stealing 156 loggerhead eggs in May 2012.

Now Jackson, 60, could return to prison for up to five years. He's scheduled for sentencing by a U.S. District Court judge Wednesday after he pleaded guilty in August to what was nearly a carbon copy of his earlier crime.

“After he was captured the first time, we thought, ‘What are the chances of that ever happening again?' ” said Mark Dodd, a wildlife biologist who heads the sea turtle recovery program for the Georgia Department of Natural Resources.

Sea turtle conservationists say egg poaching is fairly rare along the beaches where sea turtles dig nests from the Carolinas to Florida and across the Gulf Coast to Texas. But new cases every year or two indicate there's still an underground market for the eggs fueled by folklore that consuming them improves sexual performance.

“Fishermen in the Caribbean would commonly see mating sea turtles, and often when they mate, they stay together for a long time — for hours on end,” Dodd said. “So this whole sort of myth developed that if you eat a turtle egg, you get some of this extra manliness in your life.”

Dodd said Jackson confessed to boiling his turtle eggs in water seasoned with cayenne pepper and selling them at parties and bars as party favors.

It's an illicit novelty that's more common in Caribbean countries, but has found a small cultural foothold in the United States, said David Godfrey, executive director of the Florida-based Sea Turtle Conservancy.

“It clearly exists in places like Costa Rica and Nicaragua, where you can go into bars and cantinas and there's someone selling turtle eggs,” Godfrey said. “They'll drop it into a shot or suck it down and take it with a shot.”

Selling stolen sea turtle eggs does not appear to be terribly lucrative, though official estimates of their worth vary wildly. In the Georgia case, federal prosecutors said loggerhead eggs fetch up to $25 apiece. Prosecutors in a similar case in Florida last year estimated their value at $3 to $5 per egg.

The federal Fish and Wildlife Service was unable to say how many turtle egg thefts have been prosecuted in recent years, but cases are considered rare.

Last year, Kenneth Cornelius Coleman was sentenced to two years in federal prison for pleading guilty to stealing 310 sea turtle eggs from nests in Juno Beach, Fla. Authorities in Folly Beach, S.C., reported more than 100 eggs stolen in the summer of 2012, but the theft went unsolved.

Godfrey said egg thefts are infrequent enough that he does not consider them a great threat to sea turtles' survival. But he said poaching could become more popular if thieves see it as low-risk.

Adorable sea turtles don poop-catching swimsuits for science

OCTOBER 5, 2015

by Eric Hopton

Meet the half-shell heroes who have donated their excrement to science. It’s loggerhead haute-couture with a poop capture mode, and these Aussie turtles are doing their bit for conservation.

It all started when researchers at the University of Queensland wanted to collect loggerhead feces. (No, it’s not some weird hobby.) These guys were studying the diet of endangered sea turtles to help find their feeding areas, and they hoped this would lead to better ways to protect the species.

But the scientists ran into a problem. The turtles can weigh up to 260 pounds, and catching their poop as they swam in the ocean was no easy job.

So Owen Coffee, a PhD student at UQ’s School of Biological Sciences, with fellow UQ researcher Carmen da Silva, began to explore possible solutions. They captured six loggerhead sea turtles and kept them in seawater tanks at UQ’s Moreton Bay Research Station until they pooped.

“However, it was challenging to collect the entire faecal sample once it dispersed into the water. So we developed a flexible funnel anchored to the shell, to fit over the turtle’s tail. But this was not a good answer either. Because the animals are so large, it was difficult to keep the devices in place,” said Coffee.

A brilliant idea

Then Doctor Kathy Townsend, Moreton Bay’s education coordinator, remembered that researchers had previously developed soft, flexible harnesses when studying the vision of sea turtle hatchlings. The harnesses were made out of swimsuit material and were a snug fit on the turtle’s shell.

Read more at

Ontogenetic investigation of underwater hearing capabilities of loggerhead sea turtles (Caretta caretta) using a dual testing approach - via Herp Digest

The Journal of Experimental Biology

(First posted online 5/24/14)

1. Ashley L. Lavender1,*,
2. Soraya M. Bartol2 and
3. Ian K. Bartol1

- Author Affiliations

1. ¹ Old Dominion University, United States; 
2. ² Virginia Wesleyan College, United States 
3. ↵*Author for correspondence (alave002@odu.edu)

• Received September 3, 2013.
• Accepted April 23, 2014.

Abstract

Sea turtles reside in different acoustic environments with each life history stage and may have different hearing capacity throughout ontogeny. For this study, two independent yet complementary techniques for hearing assessment, i.e., behavioral and electrophysiological audiometry, were employed to (1) measure hearing in post-hatchling and juvenile loggerhead sea turtles Caretta caretta (19-62 cm straight carapace length) to determine whether these migratory turtles exhibit an ontogenetic shift in underwater auditory detection and (2) evaluate whether hearing frequency range and threshold sensitivity are consistent in behavioral and electrophysiological tests. Behavioral trials first required training turtles to respond to known frequencies, a multi-stage, time-intensive process, and then recording their behavior when they were presented with sound stimuli from an underwater speaker using a two-response forced-choice paradigm. Electrophysiological experiments involved submerging restrained, fully conscious turtles just below the air-water interface and recording auditory evoked potentials (AEPs) when sound stimuli were presented using an underwater speaker. No significant differences in behavior-derived auditory thresholds or AEP-derived auditory thresholds were detected between post-hatchling and juvenile sea turtles. While hearing frequency range (50-1000/1100 Hz) and highest sensitivity (100-400 Hz) were consistent in audiograms pooled by size class for both behavior and AEP experiments, both post-hatchlings and juveniles had significantly higher AEP-derived than behavior-derived auditory thresholds, indicating that behavioral tests are a more sensitive testing approach. The results from this study suggest that post-hatchling and juvenile loggerhead sea turtles are low frequency specialists, exhibiting little differences in threshold sensitivity and frequency bandwidth despite residence in acoustically distinct environments throughout ontogeny.

UGA researchers get $1.3 million grant for loggerhead research – via Herp Digest

Nov 24, 2013 ATHENS, GA (WTOC) - Researchers at the University of Georgia have received a grant to continue genetically "fingerprinting" loggerhead sea turtles.

UGA says that the $1.3 million grant will allow researchers to continue their work with the threatened loggerhead sea turtles in Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina.

The DNA fingerprinting of the turtles allows researchers to identify turtle mothers and their offspring. That helps the researchers to gauge how well the loggerheads are recovering after decades of population decline.

Researchers don't know how many loggerhead sea turtles are nesting in these three states. With research efforts of the Northern Recovery Unit Loggerhead DNA project, they can use genetic techniques to identify nesting females and come up with population numbers.

The project has been in place in Georgia since 2008. The latest grant from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration allows UGA researchers to continue the sampling effort for another three years.

The research also includes partners at the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources, North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission and Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries.

Loggerhead sea turtles were put on the endangered species list in the 1970s.

UGA says that during the 2013 nesting season, the Georgia Sea Turtle Cooperative counted a new record of nearly 2,300 loggerhead nests, up from a low of 358 in 2004.

Proposal Will Protect Loggerhead Sea Turtle Habitat in Coastal Waters Off Six States-After Conservation Lawsuit, Habitat Protections Set for North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama and Mississippi – via Herp Digest

7/17/13- Press Release -San Francisco— After more than five years of delay, the federal government today finally proposed to protect 36 areas of ocean habitat across six states for loggerhead sea turtles, in response to a lawsuit filed by three conservation groups. Loggerhead sea turtles face serious threats from pollution, drowning and injury in fishing gear, and loss of nesting beaches due to coastal development and sea-level rise, all of which are preventing the recovery of this vulnerable species.

Although today’s proposal is a step forward for turtle conservation, the plan limits protections to waters offshore of southeastern nesting beaches, even though loggerheads regularly go as far north as Massachusetts. It also fails to protect areas where the turtles are known to feed on both east and west coasts and in the Gulf of Mexico.

Although loggerhead sea turtles were first declared endangered in 1978, the federal government has not yet designated any critical habitat for them as required under law by the Endangered Species Act. Today’s proposal by the National Marine Fisheries Service, spanning waters off of North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama and Mississippi, comes as a direct result of a lawsuit filed last year by the conservation groups, after the government failed to respond petitions to strengthen protections for loggerhead populations dating back to 2007.

“Loggerheads migrate thousands of miles, facing giant shrimp trawls, hundreds of plastic bags, speeding yachts, fishing lines and even oil rigs, all obstacles jeopardizing their ability to feed and swim to shore to lay eggs,” said Amanda Keledjian, a marine scientist at Oceana. “Protecting turtles as they swim to their nesting and feeding areas is essential for rebuilding populations. NMFS is required by law to protect areas that threatened and endangered species need to not only survive, but recover to levels where they no longer need the safety net of the ESA.”

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposed critical habitat protection for loggerheads on land in March, covering 739 square miles of nesting beaches — 84 percent of all known nesting areas — along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts. Identifying marine habitat can be more challenging, however, as many important conditions, such as water temperature and prey availability, change over time. Protected habitat areas for these turtles must be finalized by July 1, 2014, according to the terms of the earlier settlement agreement.

“Whether they’re on sea or land, sea turtles face a cascade of threats — oil spills, plastic pollution, prey depletion, and drowning in fishing nets, among others. We can’t expect these creatures to recover and survive if we don’t protect the places where they live, and this proposal is a step in the right direction,” said the Center’s Catherine Kilduff. “This decision comes at a crucial moment. In recent years nesting numbers have fluctuated greatly — we have to ensure those baby hatchlings return from their ocean journeys to nest.”

“We must protect the critical habitat of loggerhead sea turtles if we expect this ancient species to survive and recover from their current perilous and endangered status. We will continue to fight for additional protections to give these gentle giants a chance at surviving the human threats of beach development, commercial fishing and ocean pollution that threaten their very existence,” said Todd Steiner, executive director of SeaTurtles.org.

In addition to providing protections to threatened and endangered wildlife, protecting critical habitat areas raises awareness about important sea turtle habitats and requires that federal activities, including any requiring a federal permit, be reviewed before approval to ensure there are no potentially harmful impacts to loggerhead sea turtles’ survival and recovery.

Contacts: 

Catherine Kilduff, Center for Biological Diversity,

 (415) 644-8580, ckilduff@biologicaldiversity.org

Amelia Vorpahl, Oceana, (202) 467-1968, avorpahl@oceana.org

Todd Steiner, Turtle Island Restoration Network, (415) 488-7652, tsteiner@tirn.net

Georgia beaches 'critical' for loggerheads - via Herp Digest

By Mary Landers

Savannah Morning News, March 23, 2013 --Loggerhead sea turtles are on track to get many of their nesting beaches designated as critical habitat, including some in Chatham County.

Twenty-three miles of beach on Wassaw, Little Tybee and Ossabaw islands are among the 740 miles of East and Gulf coast beaches proposed for the designation Friday by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Agency.

Beaches chosen were those able to support the highest density of nests among the genetically and geographically distinct populations of loggerheads, which typically return to the beach where they hatched or nearby to lay their eggs.

Last year, Ossabaw hosted 226 sea turtle nests; Wassaw had 139 and little Tybee had 15.

Loggerheads were listed as threatened more than 30 years ago. That listing was revised in 2011 from a single threatened species to nine distinct population segments.

Georgia’s nesting turtles are in the northern unit, which stretches from the Florida/Georgia border north to Virginia.

The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, along with the National Marine Fisheries Service, initially lacked the data to determine critical habitat, a designation required by the Endangered Species Act.

The National Marine Fisheries Service is expected later this year to designate the marine portions of the critical habitat — likely the areas adjacent to critical beach habitat plus foraging areas offshore.

During a teleconference announcing the proposal Friday, Fish & Wildlife personnel stressed what the designation wouldn’t do.

“You’re not going to see any difference out on the beach,” said Sandy MacPherson, the service’s national sea turtle coordinator. “There will be no new signage, no new reserves or refuges.”

The designation adds an extra layer of review to projects with a federal component, including federal funding or permitting, that could impact the critical habitat.

Beach renourishment is one example, although no developed beaches are proposed as critical habitat in Georgia.

MacPherson downplayed the significance of critical habitat, emphasizing that protections were already in place with the loggerheads’ threatened status under the Endangered Species Act.

Why do it, then?

“This is a requirement under the Endangered Species Act,” she said. “It’s something we must do.”

Advocacy groups, including the Center for Biological Diversity, Oceana and Turtle Island Restoration Network, had sued to force the federal agencies to create the critical habitat designation.

MacPherson said the designation was already under way before the suit was filed.

There’s evidence that critical habitats provide added protection for species, said Amanda Keledjian of Oceana.

A 2005 study published in the journal BioScience concluded, “Species with critical habitat for two or more years were more than twice as likely to have an improving population trend in the late 1990s and less than half as likely to be declining in the early 1990s, as species without.”

The designation of critical habitat for piping plovers, a small shorebird, led to seasonal closures and protections for plover nests on beaches managed by the National Park Service, said Chuck Underwood of the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service.

Jaclyn Lopez of the Center for Biological Diversity said critical habitat can be a tool for nonprofits such as her’s to force the federal government to protect threatened and endangered species to the full extent of the law. It’s also an educational tool.

“The designation calls attention to those areas that are most important,” she said.

Sea Turtles Make Strong Showing in Florida

Loggerhead sea turtles are nesting along Florida's beaches in strong numbers this year, according to researchers with the state's Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC).

This year, surveyors counted 58,172 loggerhead nests along nearly 250 miles of Florida's coastline. The FWC said this is one of the highest counts since monitoring began in 1989.

"After a steep decline in Florida loggerhead nesting between 1998 and 2007, nesting has risen over the past five years," Blair Witherington, a FWC research scientist, said in a statement Friday (Oct. 19). The number of nests peaked at 59,918 in 1998 and hit a low with 28,074 in 2007.

Continued:  http://www.livescience.com/24146-sea-turtles-make-strong-showing-in-florida.html

Blood Tests Show Where Loggerhead Turtles Go

Every year, thousands of endangered loggerhead sea turtles crawl ashore at Florida's Archie Carr National Wildlife Refuge to lay eggs before dragging their leathery bodies back into the sea. But where they go after their trek isn't well-known.

Scientists can use GPS devices to record turtles' travels, but these geolocator tags are expensive, and may be lost if turtles die. A group of researchers has come up with a less expensive, easier way to find out where loggerheads voyage: testing their blood. A new study, published Sept. 20 in the journal PLoS ONE, found that this technique is just as accurate as using GPS tags.

The technique examines carbon isotopes in the turtles' blood, which come from the food the animals eat. Carbon has different isotopes, or variants, present in all living things, and the exact mix of isotopes varies by region; for example, the mixture in the mid-Atlantic is different from that of the Caribbean. By examining the mixture of carbon isotopes in the turtles' blood, scientists could determine the region to which the turtles migrated.

Continued:  http://www.livescience.com/23379-tracking-loggerhead-sea-turtles.html