THREE MORE SAVED!

Three more little guys saved this morning! If I can save 1000, one (1) may actually survive until maturity and return to our beaches! I've got about 800 to go, for my first 1000, so I will need to do this for a few more years. The hatchling that you see in the photo in this blog just hatched this morning - a little late, since the sun was already up, but not to late to help him/her find his/her way to the ocean.

Speaking of sea turtle survival, there was a great program on the National Geographic channel last week that showed the lifelong efforts of an environmentalist in Australia. He has kept track of Loggerhead nests and hatchlings (plus other types of sea turtles when they encountered them) for about 30 years. They would tag juveniles that they found in the ocean around the Australian beaches that he patroled, and "notch" the shell of the hatchlings from the nests that they had marked for study. The program described how, once the hatchlings hatch and reach the ocean, they are carried by the Pacific Ocean currents. The cycle appears to be that they travel with the easterly current in the south Pacific toward South America, then north along the west coast of South America, and finally westward toward Asia and Australia. I believe the that the program indicated that after 30 years of studying and waiting, they found one of the adult Loggerheads back on their Australian beaches! Quite a cycle, but they are very good at this "travel" since their ancestors have been doing this for over a million years! The study indicated that they believe that they found the reason for an 80% decline in the Pacific Ocean Loggerhead population - fishing nets. Once that was determined to be one of the major causes for the declining population, new laws were implemented throughout the Pacific that required fishermen to use nets that had "turtle doors" that would allow sea turtles to escape from the nets but keep in the fish. With these changes, they believe that the decline has ended and there appears to be a slight increase in the Loggerhead population in the Pacific.