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Cease sea turtle carnage

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By CARL SAFINA

Special To The Tampa Tribune

Published: April 14, 2009

Sea turtles will soon start crawling ashore to nest on Florida's shores in a ritual that's millions of years old. But, unless we protect sea turtles in the Gulf of Mexico, fewer turtles will even reach the beaches to nest.

This would be a great loss for Florida and the nation.

Serious trouble is brewing offshore. Sea turtles are getting snagged on commercial fishing lines that stretch for miles. Turtles foraging along the continental shelf grab the bait and drown before fishermen retrieve the lines.

Statewide, the number of loggerhead sea turtle nests plummeted by 40 percent in the past decade.

The evidence is compelling:

In 2005, the federal Fisheries Service ruled that up to 113 "hard-shell" sea turtles (several species except leatherbacks) could be caught by longline fishing boats during a three-year period without jeopardizing the turtles' survival.

But the Fisheries Service found later that far more turtles were snagged than that: Nearly 1,000 turtles were caught on longlines between July 2006 and December 2008 - more than eight times the number allowed. Many drowned.

This slaughter could have been avoided if the fishery were better monitored and if the public had access to fisheries data as soon as it was collected so that swift measures could be taken.

Faced with this evidence, the National Marine Fisheries Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration must halt the bottom longline fishery immediately to comply with the law and protect sea turtles.

Florida's loggerhead population is crucial to the species' worldwide survival. To find loggerheads at the densities found in Florida, you'd have to go to the Arabian Peninsula and to Masirah Island in Oman.

Florida and Masirah account for 70 to 90 percent of the world's loggerhead nesting, but Masirah's turtles also face threats from fishing, beach lighting, egg collecting, beach driving, and so on.

In Florida just a few years ago, you could almost trip over loggerheads - they build nearly 50,000 nests here in a good year. In 2007, the number of nests declined below 30,000.

The Obama administration has brought a new sense of stewardship to Washington, recognizing both the need to use good science to manage resources and the government's responsibility to protect public waters.

The new administration should seize this chance to monitor fisheries data closely, provide adequate observers in the field and protect one of our planet's most critically threatened species before it is too late.

Let's all help the sea turtles make it back to the beach in Florida this year.

Scientist and writer Carl Safina is president of Blue Ocean Institute and the author of "Voyage of the Turtle." He is the winner of the Lannan Literary Award for nonfiction, the John Burroughs Medal for literature, and a MacArthur Prize.

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