Source: Florida Today
NASA will host the launch of thousands of baby sea turtles doomed by the BP blowout, in a mission being kept hush, hush — for the reptile’s sake.
“This is such an extremely delicate operation they’re trying to pull off,” NASA spokesman Allard Beutel said. “They want to give these turtles a shot.”
Only one in 1,000 hatchling sea turtles makes it to adulthood, experts estimate. But with oil right offshore of the Gulf Coast, biologists put those odds at zero.
So they hope thousands of baby sea turtles soon will hatch at Kennedy Space Center, from an undisclosed climate-controlled facility. Once they break from their shells, the turtles quickly will be taken to nearby beaches at night to make their mad dash to the Gulf Stream.
The hatchlings only feed along the Sargassum seaweed line at the edge of current.
Federal biologists won’t disclose the location of where the turtles are being kept to prevent anyone — including NASA staff and contractors — from inadvertently disturbing the turtles.
“We have some (eggs) already onsite,” Beutel said.
Biologists plan to dig up about 700 turtle nests thought doomed by the ongoing oil spewing from the Deepwater Horizon blowout. Nests have 100 to 120 eggs.
Most of the nests are laid by threatened loggerhead sea turtles, the most common nesters in Florida and along Brevard County beaches. A few are also possible from three endangered species: Kemp’s ridley, leatherback and green sea turtles.
They’ll dig up some more nests Monday from Panama City to Apalachicola for transport to KSC.
The Space Coast was chosen because NASA offered to take them and has climate-controlled facilities, said Patricia Behnke, a spokeswoman with Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission in Tallahassee.
“It was a situation where they had to do something about it,” Behnke said. “It’s not so much that beaches are covered with oil. It’s what will happen to the hatchlings once they get out into the water.”
Last resort
Biologists said the relocation was a “last resort” and that the turtles surely would surelydie if they hatched and swam into the oil in the Gulf.
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