{"id":67,"date":"2009-06-03T09:33:50","date_gmt":"2009-06-03T16:33:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.edf.org\/edfish\/2009\/06\/03\/kemps-ridley-sea-turtle-rebound-a-short-history\/"},"modified":"2009-06-03T09:36:00","modified_gmt":"2009-06-03T16:36:00","slug":"kemps-ridley-sea-turtle-rebound-a-short-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.edf.org\/edfish\/2009\/06\/03\/kemps-ridley-sea-turtle-rebound-a-short-history\/","title":{"rendered":"Kemp’s Ridley Sea Turtle Rebound: A Short History"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Ryan Ono, Gulf Oceans Program Research and Outreach Associate<\/em><\/p>\n

Until half a century ago, tens of thousands of Kemp\u2019s ridley sea turtles would surge onto Mexican beaches in a few large nesting events to lay their eggs. (One was estimated having up to 40,000 turtles!)<\/p>\n

But, at the turn of the 20th century turtle meat and eggs became popular delicacies, causing large numbers of turtles to be harvested at sea and many eggs to be gathered from beaches. Additionally in the 1940s and 1950s, numerous sea turtles were caught in the nets of the rapidly expanding shrimp fishery.<\/p>\n\n\n
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These pressures caused the Kemp\u2019s ridley population to crash – almost to the point of extinction, when nesting events would number only one or two thousand turtles.<\/p>\n

In the 1960s and 1970s, joint U.S.-Mexican efforts to revive turtle populations re-established a secondary nesting site in the U.S. to protect the eggs from poaching and damage caused by humans.\u00a0 Hatchery and \u201chead-start\u201d programs were also started. The head-start program raised turtles for a few years until they were big enough to be released into the wild \u2013 about the size of a dinner plate.<\/p>\n

In the 1990s, EDF\u2019s Michael Bean and Pam Baker helped the recovery effort by fighting for gear modifications to all shrimping boats called turtle excluder devices, or \u201cTEDs,\u201d which reduced the number of turtles caught.\u00a0 They also worked for shrimping closures off the Texas coast during nesting seasons.<\/p>\n

As recently as eight years ago the number of endangered Kemp\u2019s Ridley turtle nests found on Texas shores numbered fewer than ten.\u00a0 Since 2004 however, there have been consecutive record breaking years and in 2008 a total of 195 Kemp\u2019s Ridley turtle nests were found.\u00a0<\/p>\n

This year\u2019s total stands currently at 154 nests and is on track to surpass last year\u2019s number, with two months of the season left to go.\u00a0 Check back at the end of the summer for an update!\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Ryan Ono, Gulf Oceans Program Research and Outreach Associate Until half a century ago, tens of thousands of Kemp\u2019s ridley sea turtles would surge onto Mexican beaches in a few large nesting events to lay their eggs. (One was estimated having up to 40,000 turtles!) But, at the turn of the 20th century turtle …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1882,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[263],"tags":[72531,559,558,560],"coauthors":[5184],"class_list":["post-67","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gulf-of-mexico","tag-gulf-of-mexico","tag-kemps-ridley-sea-turtles","tag-ryan-ono","tag-sea-turtles"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nKemp's Ridley Sea Turtle Rebound: A Short History - EDFish<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/blogs.edf.org\/edfish\/2009\/06\/03\/kemps-ridley-sea-turtle-rebound-a-short-history\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Kemp's Ridley Sea Turtle Rebound: A Short History - EDFish\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"By Ryan Ono, Gulf Oceans Program Research and Outreach Associate Until half a century ago, tens of thousands of Kemp\u2019s ridley sea turtles would surge onto Mexican beaches in a few large nesting events to lay their eggs. 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