The Recovery of the World’s Most Endangered Sea Turtle Has Stalled

[Omaha Steve]

Six years after the Deepwater Horizon disaster, Kemp’s ridley sea turtle nesting has fallen to its worst level in years.



Kemp's ridley sea turtle. (Photo: Courtesy U.S. Environmental Protection Agency/Flickr)

http://www.takepart.com/article/2016/03/30/kemps-ridley-sea-turtle-endangered-deepwater-horizon?cmpid=tpdaily-eml-2016-03-30

MAR 30, 2016 John R. Platt covers the environment, technology, philanthropy, and more for Scientific American, Conservation, Lion, and other publications.

Decades of efforts to restore the Gulf of Mexico’s populations of critically endangered Kemp’s ridley sea turtles have stalled, and the species may be on the decline again, worrying new research reveals.

Kemp’s ridley sea turtles, the world’s rarest sea turtle species, nearly went extinct in the second half of the last century after fishing nets devastated their populations. By 1985 the species was down to its last 200 to 250 breeding females.

Habitat protection and conservation efforts helped turn that around, including the introduction of devices that allow sea turtles to escape fishing nets. Populations began rebounding during the 1990s, rising as much as 15 percent a year.

“I considered it a gold star for how you do conservation,” said Thane Wibbels, a professor of biology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and one of the authors of the new study. “It restored a species that was almost literally extinct.”

FULL story at link.