The story we are bringing you today is about sea turtles. In fact, it’s about the smallest and most endangered of sea turtles, called the Kemp’s Ridley. It’s a surprising and optimistic tale about a turtle’s return to Louisiana.
We reported this episode back in 2023, but we wanted to revisit it because who doesn’t need more sea turtles in their life right now? And also because there has been some big news for sea turtles recently.
This episode was hosted and produced by Carlyle Calhoun. Sea Change's theme music is by Jon Batiste, and our sound designer is Emily Jankowski. Carlyle Calhoun is the executive producer.
Sea Change is a WWNO and WRKF production. We are part of the NPR Podcast Network and distributed by PRX. And to help others find our podcast, hit subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Sea Change is made possible with major support from the Gulf Research Program of the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Sea Change is also supported by the Water Collaborative of Greater New Orleans. WWNO’s Coastal Desk is supported by the Walton Family Foundation, the Meraux Foundation, and the Greater New Orleans Foundation.
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TRANSCRIPT
I’m Carlyle Calhoun, and you’re listening to Sea Change. The story we are bringing you today is about sea turtles. In fact, it’s about the smallest and most endangered of sea turtles, called the Kemp’s Ridley. It’s a surprising and optimistic tale about a turtle’s return to Louisiana.
We wanted to return to this episode, because one who doesn’t need more sea turtles in their life right now? And two, we wanted to check in on how these tiny turtles are doing, and how sea turtles are doing more broadly.
So I called up David Godfrey who’s the executive director of the Sea Turtle Conservancy
DAVID: we're actually the world's oldest sea turtle research and conservation group.
It’s been the organization and David’s lifelong mission to study and protect sea turtles. And they’ve needed all the help they can get.
DAVID: Many populations of sea turtles were being wiped off the planet largely because they were on the menu. We were eating them into oblivion or just indifferent to how certain actions were affecting them, you know, um, indiscriminate, um, um, you know, taking of them for, for commercial and international trade for sea turtle products.
Turtles were being killed for things like turtle soup and Tortoise shell glasses, tortoise shell combs, guitar picks …and they were also being entangled in fishing nets.
DAVID: And it has taken you know, 70 years, trying to protect habitat, trying to slowly understand everything we can about this animal so that laws and regulations can be put in place to stop the things that are, that are happening that accidentally kill them.
Also, uh, minimize our harvesting of them or make it just illegal as it is in the United States through the Endangered Species Act.
And guess what? Some actually good news,
DAVID: all of those things have, you know, have begun to bear fruit. You know, if you start saving a turtle that takes 30 years to reach maturity, it's 30 years before you see turtles begin to come back to the beach.And we have been seeing that.
A recent NOAA study found most sea turtle populations rebounding worldwide. In the US, David says green turtles and loggerheads are setting new record highs almost every year.
DAVID: There are definitely things to be optimistic about foresee turtles globally because what we know is that conservation can work. They can recover if given the time and, and secure habitat, and we stop harvesting them.
But David says, climate change and beach erosion and some countries failing to protect sea turtles mean threats continue. Still, we should find reasons to be hopeful and David says recognize all the work that’s been done to protect these majestic animals.
DAVID: The Endangered Species Act passed in the 1970s seems such a, a small thing and far away and long ago. But that act is why there are sea turtles left in the United States and we have got to protect it. It's why there are bald eagles flying around and many other examples of success stories. Um, these things are worth fighting for. Um, they're part of what makes America great and they work.
Hopefully that all gave you a little feel-good serotonin boost, and now for the show. Can the tiniest and most endangered sea turtle of all, the Kemp’s Ridleys, make a comeback?
You’re going to want to stay tuned to hear this sea turtle adventure. That’s coming up.
EPISODE
It is six o'clock in the morning and I'm standing next to a short tarmac runway in Belle Chase, Louisiana, just across the Mississippi River from New Orleans.
TODD: It's a pretty grueling flight. Okay. So, uh, most people that we've brought up get sick. If you get sick, just, just use the bag and we're, we're good to go.
That's Todd Baker. He and Matt Weigel are the two state biologists I've been talking to for months, begging them to take me with them to the most remote corner of Louisiana. They fly there weekly as part of their job to help save a rapidly disappearing coast, but very few others have ever been. Todd's prepping me for the flight.
TODD: Well, we're going to Chandeleur Islands, which is about 22 miles south of Gulfport, Mississippi as the crow flies, as the sea plane flies
The Chandeleurs. I've heard about these isolated islands for years, and always in almost mystical terms, the crescent shape of islands loosely hugging the toe of Louisiana's boot aren't easy to get to. You either need hours across the open gulf by boat, or if you're lucky, like I am today, by seaplane. So, despite the apparently high probability I'm about to need a bar fag, I am feeling very lucky.
TODD: These islands were set aside, primarily for birds. And you're gonna see plenty of those today too.
The chandeleurs are a globally important bird habitat. And I'm hoping you'll get to see some of the rare birds that nest here, like the small piping plovers or the bright yellow beaked lease turns.
But the real reason I'm heading out to these barrier islands is in the hopes of seeing an even rare creature, one that hadn't been seen anywhere on the shores of Louisiana in over 75 years until last summer.
Here's Matt.
MATT: Last year was a, you know, a surprise for a lot of folks. Including for Matt and Todd, the ones who actually made the shocking discovery, and I'm hoping today may be another lucky day.
We load up the Kodiak 100 amphibious plane with our gear and take off following the Mississippi River South, and then we're out over the wide open Gulf of Mexico.
A blue expanse only interrupted by small square oil platforms peppering the sea below. Finally, I see an island on the horizon, the Chandeleurs.
Our pilot, Michael, slows the plane and we descend until we're flying low and slow. We're all scanning the beach looking, hoping. Then Todd sees something— what looks like tire tracks across the sand below.
Alright, Carlyle, you just got lucky as hell.
MUSIC
I am hoping to see a Kemps up close on the island. But first, I wanna talk to someone who's seen a lot of them to help me understand these rare turtles. Kemps, Ridley Sea turtle hatch lengths start out as a black to charcoal gray color. They're about the size of a silver dollar. This is Dr. Donna Shaver, the world's top Kemp's Ridley sea turtle expert.
She's in her early sixties with long blonde hair. She looks like she was meant to spend her life on the beach.
DONNA: As these little hatchlings swim away from the shoreline, they swim vigorously for the first few days of life, through the swim frenzy.
The babies then drift with currents snacking on seaweed and crabs.
DONNA: when they reach about yearlings, they start to get this gray, olive, green coloring on top. Then, when they reach adulthood at about two and a half feet long. They're the smallest and the lightest of the sea turtles. They're beautiful. They're beautiful at every size.
All sea turtles are endangered, but Kemp's Ridleys are by far the most at risk and the most mysterious, at least they are to us humans trying to understand a creature that's been on this earth for millions of years.
Kemp's mostly live in the Gulf of Mexico, but when the young go exploring, they can be seen paddling along the East Coast as far north as Nova Scotia.
Way before Matt and Todd saw a Kemps on the Chandeleurs, before Kemps Ridleys were nicknamed the Heartbreak Turtle, before they were listed as an endangered species, before there was even an Endangered Species Act, there were a lot of Kemps, but still, very little was known about them. Many didn't even think it was a distinct species. While people had seen plenty of other sea turtle species nesting, the same wasn't true for Kemps.
These turtles had scientists totally baffled. And there was one big question everyone was asking, where were these mysterious little turtles coming from? Where were their nests? There was this scientist, Archie Carr, and if anyone was gonna get to the bottom of this question, it was the guy known as Turtle Man.
He was obsessed with solving what he called the riddle of the Ridley.
DONNA: When Archie Carr was doing his work, the species was very poorly known and some hypothesized, it might even be a hybrid. They didn't know where the main nesting beach was located.
Carr spent two decades searching the Caribbean far and wide for where Kemps were nesting.
But even Turtle Man couldn't solve the riddle. It wasn't until the sixties that another scientist found this old film shot decades before in Mexico, the film shows tens of thousands of Mama Kim's Ridley Sea Turtles, a solid mile of them. Crawling up the beach and nesting. It was the most turtle eggs scientists had ever seen in one place. They concluded this must be it. The main nesting beach turtle man had been searching for where the vast majority of baby Kemps were born. And all this was happening on this one beach on the eastern coast of Mexico. This place called Rancho Nuevo.
So one mystery was solved, but there was something else. The film showed this incredible and unique way Kemp's Nest.
DONNA: They tend to nest in these synchronous emergencies at the same time called arribadas. Arribada is Spanish for arrival, meaning the arrival of a mass synchronized nesting.
You see, the reason that old film was able to show 40,000 turtles on one day on one beach is because Ridleys, unlike other sea turtles, often nest together as a big group.
DONNA: The mama turtles begin gathering offshore and then swim into the beach altogether to lay their eggs.
We still don't know why they do this. Another one of their mysteries is thought that perhaps because Kemps are so small, it's a safety in numbers kind of thing, but. Here's the problem. While scientists were amazed to learn about the arribada, there was another group of people who were equally interested in the Kemp's nesting behavior, but for a very different reason.
Donna says, in that old film, you could see nest after nest being poached.
DONNA: and the eggs were taken and mounted up so that they could be carted off and then sold as a supposed aphrodisiac.
Turns out all this synchronicity also made these turtles super vulnerable to a human threat: poachers. And they were stealing Kemp's eggs by the truck full because Kemp's lay their eggs at the same time, poachers don't have to sit around waiting for the occasional lone nesting female before stealing her a hundred or so eggs. Instead, a fortune arrives in a day.
DONNA: When biologists in Mexico started learning about that nesting beach, they sent armed marines there to protect the nesting turtles and the eggs. They took it very seriously. The Mexican forces were ordered to shoot first and ask questions later if poaching was suspected.
But turtle numbers continued to free-fall thanks to poachers stealing babies and dying and getting tangled in fishing gear. Kemp's were declared an Endangered Species in 1970, this species was almost driven to extinction in one human generation.
DONNA: The population plummeted just exponentially plummeted. We were so close to losing them entirely.
By 1985, there were only 250 mature female turtles left on the planet. The world's smallest sea turtle was circling the drain. Scientists knew more had to be done for this species to survive. It was a conservation emergency, and this was an experimental effort.
DONA: Nobody knew if it would work. American scientists decided they would join forces with their Mexican colleagues to try to save this beloved sea turtle.
Desperate times called for desperate measures, and these scientists decided to try something that had never been tried. Start a new nesting colony elsewhere, somewhere safe from the poachers, but how could they do it?
Enter budding young scientist, Donna Shaver at the moment, Kemp's Ridleys almost disappeared forever. Donna found her calling.
DONNA: I decided right then I was gonna dedicate my career to trying to help save the Kemp's Ridley Turtle.
Her PhD advisor said it was a foolish move, that Kemps were done for.
But she believed something that almost no one else believed in, that the tiniest sea turtles could be saved from extinction.
DONNA: I knew it would require sacrifices. I, I knew that it would mean I couldn't have the normal kinda life where you go out to lunch with the ladies, you go get your hair done at the hairdresser, you have, uh, children. I wasn't able to do all that.
Instead, since 1980, Donna's life's work has been trying to start a new colony of Kemp's in the spot that was chosen for this experiment. Was Padre Island National Seashore in Texas, because while Rancho Nuevo, Mexico, was the mothership for nesting Kemp's, it wasn't the only nesting site.
There were scattered nests on other beaches in the Gulf from Florida to Texas, beaches and sea turtles are deeply connected, and the specific beach where a sea turtle is born is particularly important.
DONNA: It's known much better now, but it was thought then that the turtles go back to the beach where they were born to lay their own eggs.
But scientists didn't know exactly how or what the mechanism was.
DONNA: Now we know that there's, uh, navigation in relation to the earth's magnetic field, and that may be important in bringing them back, but at that time we didn't know. So we tried to hedge our bets.
If you spend any time with scientists talking about sea turtles, they use this word a lot. Imprinting. The full name for it is Geomagnetic Imprinting.
Sea turtle's first memories are imprinted with a magnetic map of the sandy beach where they're born like a GPS for turtles. Then more than a decade later, females access their stored map to navigate through the ocean back home to have their own babies. I mean, how amazing is that? So how could this experiment work?
If all these baby Kemps turtles are hardwired to return to Mexico, how can scientists start a new colony in Texas? One that these turtles, once they grow up, would eventually return to? The scientists came up with a plan, a complicated plan.
DONNA: We sent down Padre Island sand for those eggs to be collected, to, to be packed in, to come back to Padre where they are cared for until hatching. The eggs sit in an incubation facility until they're ready to hatch. Then we took them down to the beach, released them, allowed them to crawl down the beach, so they get this exposure to the Padre Island beach as hatchlings. So we tried to imprint turtles to Padre Island in hopes that they would return there to nest.
Then the tiny turtles were taken back to the lab until they grew larger to give them a better shot against predators, until finally, finally, they were released one by one, and the young Kemp's swam out into the Gulf.
DONNA: And it's magnificent when you see it gliding through the water.
But would it work after all the shipping of sand and turtle eggs back and forth between the US and Mexico?
Would any of these turtles actually return to Padre Island and repopulate to help save the species? Biologists did not know if any of them would even survive.
Donna was in charge of looking for the miracle. She ended up kind of a bootstrap operation and for years she and a squad of turtle loving volunteers, patrolled Padre Island Beach, keeping watch for any returning turtles.
DONNA: but with, with no money, no vehicles, nothing. So we tried to do the best we could to look year after year and I finally, you know, I know that they started to give up hope and. I think it was Linus in the pumpkin patch.
You know, in Charlie Brown when Linus waits all by himself in the pumpkin patch, waiting on the arrival of the mythical great pumpkin while everyone else is trick or treating.
CHARLIE BROWN CLIP
you must be crazy. When are you going to stop believing in something that isn't true?
But finally, in 1996 it happened.
DONNA: I'm the one who didn't give up. I believed. And yet when I saw the first one. With my own eyes brushed off the top shell and saw the tag, brushed it off again, wet it, looked at it again, and I said, Oh my God, this is what we've been waiting for all these years.
I was so overjoyed. I jumped up and down and jumped up and down and hugged the people that were with me.
Incredibly, the desperate experiment worked. A decade after releasing these turtles as babies two. Now grownup Kemps had come back here to their adopted home and there's now a second nesting colony on Padre Island.
And every year with more baby Kemps, making it to adulthood to reproduce and also new technology to keep turtles outta fishing nets, the species started recovering.
Scientists were absolutely amazed at the comeback. Things were finally looking up for the Kemps. It was thought that up until about 2010, the mathematical models predicted that the population was going to continue exponentially and could be downlisted to a threatened species in the year 2020, while the 2020s passed, and it didn't happen.
Kemp's Ridleys aren't called the Heartbreak Turtle for nothing.
While Donna and her scientist friends were lovingly trying to recolonize the turtles one by one on the beach, another kind of manmade challenge was on the horizon in the deep water.
Deep Water Horizon news clips
That's after the break.
BREAK
Flying low on the backside of the Chandeleur Islands. The Kodiak lands in shallow water. Matt, Todd and I all grab our backpacks loaded down with gear and climb out of the plane. To begin our search for the elusive Kemps, we all hop off the plane into thigh deep water and wade through a meadow of seagrass, then through sharp blades of marsh.
And eventually climb up onto dry land, a pristine island. No trace of humans except for us in the plane.
But that wasn't the case. Back in 2010 when the BP Deep Water Horizon rig exploded releasing an ungodly amount of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. It was the worst environmental disaster in US history.
MATT: The chandeleurs were just ground zero so many times when that oil was coming in, it was a constant release for for months.
At the time, Matt, the state biologist, managed Louisiana's Wildlife and Fisheries response to the spill.
MATT: it was a sad time, and it was a scary time because, you know, for, for such a long time, the, the well wasn't controlled. We didn't know when it was gonna end, you know, we didn't know if it was gonna end, and we were working 12, 13, 14, 15, 16 hour days.
Oil was everywhere along the coast. In the marshes, in the mangrove. Land was eroded, habitat was lost, and Matt and Todd were both working like crazy to help save wildlife from the largest oil spill of all time. These barrier islands, the Chandeleurs were among the hardest hit spots anywhere. And Kemp's Ridleys were among the hardest hit species.
You see the chandeliers that jut into the Gulf. Well, they happen to be on the edge of the Kemp's Ridley's favorite feeding ground, where young Kemp's love to hang out in the sargassum seaweed and eat all the little plants and animals that gather there. And this buffet now sat directly in the middle of the oil spill.
MATT: I mean, that's our nurseries and. Just as that, that floating sargassum collects in certain areas, the floating oil also collects in those same areas.
It was estimated that almost half a million sea turtles were exposed to oil during the spill, and over half of those were Kemp's Ridleys. In total, well over a hundred thousand young sea turtles died before the spill.
Kemp's numbers were recovering. But in the years following the BP disaster, their population again began to fall. Scientists say there could be more factors at play, but the oil spill was devastating to the species.
MATT: There were plenty of oiled Kemps, you know, dead and alive, recovered, you know, from those impacted areas.
Hearts were breaking all over again, but last summer, hope returned. In July of 2022, more than 10 years after the BP oil spill, Todd and Matt were flying to the Chandeleurs to survey birds when they spotted those now familiar tire track like marks in the sand from above. The biologists started exploring the beach on foot searching for those tracks also known as crawls.
They suspect it belonged to a sea turtle that found its way back to these battered islands. What they found was even more astounding because when they followed some tracks back to the edge of a dune, they didn't just see any baby sea turtle, but the most endangered a baby Kemp's Ridley. Matt and Todd were high-fiving.
They couldn't believe it and neither could anyone else. After all these islands have been through getting hammered by repeated hurricanes and disasters after 75 years. Kemp's Ridleys are back here on the Chandeleur Islands.
So far, Matt and Todd have confirmed 13 nests this year and today we're hoping to find more of them.
TODD: I've got some radios and I've got one in my backpack. Okay. And we split from you. I'll put turn this on. 10. Okay. So just in case. Just in case we need to talk. 10 10.
Yeah. Matt's checking out his GPS for coordinates. We're trying to find the tracks Todd saw from the air.
MATT: It's easy to pass 'em up.
Then off in the distance, we finally see them almost like there may be something right there.
Todd pulls out his camera and starts taking pictures even up close. They look like tire tracks, but from a vehicle that got lost.
MATT: Right now we're just trying to figure out what exactly is going on. 'cause usually once they nest, they'll go straight back out to the water, but this one meanders up and meanders off.
We follow the crawls across the beach and back onto the edge of the dunes. Where Todd and Matt start looking for what's called a body pit. It sounds bad, but it's not. It's the area of sand the turtle clears before using her flippers to dig an egg chamber where she'll lay her eggs.
Todd: Yeah, something off right over there. Maybe.
We keep wandering along the edge of the dunes where turtles usually lay their eggs, hoping to find that nest.
CARLYLE: So we just crawled up over the dune.
MATT: Over the dune.
CARLYLE: Is this common?
MATT: No. We're gonna look around a little bit more.
CARLYLE: So she just wasn't feeling it?
MATT: She thought she was feeling it and then she changed her mind.
Todd and Matt measured the turtle crawl length and width and add it to the chart on their clipboards.
TODD: We'll name this one. Disappointment Nest
After 45 minutes of swatting mosquitoes and searching the dunes, no dice, nothing. It's a false crawl, meaning the mama turtle never made a nest.
Todd: So in this case, she thought she found a spot and for whatever reason it wasn't good enough and she went back out to the Gulf. So she'll be back though, hopefully anyway.
So it might seem like we're just these turtle lovers on a turtle safari, but Todd and Matt are actually here to gather data.
They've been flying out here weekly since the beginning of nesting season in May. In an effort to prove these endangered turtles are indeed back on the Chandeleurs, because even as these islands become a haven for endangered turtles, another heartbreak could be looming. The Chandeleurs and coastal Louisiana are disappearing.
We're losing land here at one of the fastest rates on Earth for a whole bunch of reasons. Almost all of them due to us humans. If there's a silver lining to the Deep Water Horizon disaster, it's this. Eventually BP was forced to pay up for its environmental crimes. Just under 9 billion of the $20 billion settlement are set aside for restoration of the Gulf Coast, which means there might be money to restore these islands and help these turtles.
That's only if Todd who works for the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority can convince those holding the purse strings that these wild barrier islands inhabited only by birds and sea grass and sea turtles are worth saving because while 9 billion might sound like a lot of money.
Down here in the Gulf, there are countless places that need restoring and there's a lot of competition and heated debate over who, what and where deserves that restoration money.
Todd's hoping for over 200 million enough to pay for a massive, in delicate construction project to build back up these islands. Make them resilient so that they too can survive. But will the Chandeleurs get it?
TODD: So we, we don't really know at this point. We're in the data collection mode. We don't have a single dime for construction just yet. And so a lot of what we build will depend on the funding.
But now there's even more reason to save this place. Todd has a new beloved mascot to prove it.
TODD: Mother Nature's built perfect islands for these, um, turtles. And what we wanna do is provide more fuel to Mother Nature to continue to do what she's been doing for a long time. So she'll take care of making sure the turtle habitat is out here to some extent, but we're gonna try to give it our best jumpstart that we can.
There's data from way back in the 1940s that it possibly was home to a small colony. And after everything the turtles and the islands have been through, they were kind of written off.
No one expected sea turtles back here, let alone the most endangered of them all back out on the beach. We approach crawl number 17, according to Matt's chart. Which they discovered in late May.
MATT: And this is the species we, we believe it to be. We believe it's a Kemps. And then also our earliest hatch date on this one's July 8th.
So any day now, if this is a viable nest, any day now will have hatchlings emerging. So pretty exciting stuff.
Any day now. I can hardly stand it. I've never seen a baby sea turtle before of any species. But ever since learning about the story of the Kemps, I've been dying to see one. And of course Matt's been telling me how amazing it is to see them up close.
MATT: I consider us very lucky. I mean, we, we spent a good bit of time outta here doing these surveys, but this year we got to see two actual turtles, two adult females, ashore when was laying eggs when we flew over. That was, that was great. I mean, that was Phenomenal. And then the first nest we evaluate, we found two live hatchlings in there, which is just, just awesome.
Matt tells me the two teeny babies were struggling to crawl out of the nest. He and Todd helped them along, making it down to the surf. Two more, Kemps making it into the Gulf.
MATT: And yeah, the species is, is recovering. The numbers are are still low. The recovery's kind of tapered off in recent years.
Sea turtles are what are known as a keystone species, which basically means they're critical to the larger ecosystem.
And if they're doing all right, that means the ecosystem is as well.
So these turtles showing up on the beaches of this isolated string of islands is telling us not only that Kemp's may be doing better, but that the whole system here is. One people didn't know would ever fully recover. And those baby Kemp's Ridley turtles, the ones Todd and Matt just saw or the ones that will hatch any day now, they’re imprinting on this beach.
Matt: I mean, to be able to, see them swim off is, you know, there are odds of making it, you know, like one in a thousand, you know, but, just the nests we're finding this year, we've got, hundreds of camps, making it to those waters, well over 1000, I'm sure. we're hoping, uh, this'll be a, you know, Potentially even a, small colony for Kemp someday,
Carlyle: so far today we’ve been striking out.
Matt: It was, yeah, it wasn't a, a total bust. We had one really interesting crawl and then yeah, we had a false crawl,(might need but then she ultimately went back to the water with her eggs and then yeah) but those turtles are still around.
Those eggs are going to have to come out, so they'll be back on our beach. We might catch them next week.
Carlyle: There may be Kemp's out here, but unfortunately, I didn't see them. Turns out I am not lucky as hell today. Kemp's Ridleys are proving themselves to still be mysterious. 13 turtle nests is a lot when until last summer, people expected none, but it's really not that many. Flying back on the seaplane, I was bummed not to see any Kemp's, not to experience this exciting return of an ancient, endangered species.
But I have to remember to temper my expectations, i mean even turtle expert Donna Shaver scoured the beach for a decade before she got the chance to see a returning Kemp’s. She didn’t give up hope.
And of course, the important thing is that Kemp’s Ridleys have come back! to Padre Island and to the Chandeleurs. But anyone who knows the story of the heartbreak turtle knows you have to remain vigilant.
Donna: Because the species is not fully recovered yet. We've made strides, but it's still the most critically endangered sea turtle species. there's still more that must be done and people that want to take their foot off the pedal and move on to other things because this has been going on a long time. We need you. We need you to hang in there because we're not there yet. It's one of God's creatures, and who are we to say which one comes and which one goes and which one we should give up on.
Carlyle: I got an email from Matt and Todd the other day. They told me they didn’t find any more nests after our expedition together…their final count this summer was 13. But unfortunately, many of them didn’t hatch and Matt and Todd don’t know why. They are still analyzing the data, but they think this year’s record-breaking heat and drought may have played a role. Two things we know are worsening due to a changing climate.
Back home in New Orleans, I see our own changing habitat. The threats to people in Southern Louisiana that are maybe not so different from the ones the Kemps are facing just offshore, on their vanishing island.
Donna has a favorite quote, and part of it reads: “in the end, we will conserve only what we love, we will love only what we understand…”
Donna, Todd, Matt, and many others are still trying to understand the riddles of the Kemp’s Ridley sea turtles. And we are all trying to understand what climate change means for us all.
And I wonder if we choose to also protect the wild places where we don’t live and species beyond ourselves, then maybe there is hope. And maybe our hearts won’t have to break again …at least not for these tiny turtles.
UPDATE
This is Carlyle again. I hope you enjoyed the episode.
So how are the Kemp’s Ridleys doing today in 2025? And what about the Chandeleurs? Did we decide to protect them?
I’m happy to report good news almost all around…Todd and Matthew told me they observed 56 crawls this year…that’s the most every since they started surveying 4 years ago. There are 3 sea turtle species now nesting on the Chandeleurs, loggerheads, green turtles and Kemps Ridleys, and more than half of the crawls are from Kemps. So yes, the tiny and mighty Kemps are still making a comeback in Louisiana, and Texas and Florida are also seeing record numbers.
The same can’t be said about the Kemps Ridleys historic and still main nesting beach in Mexico. Remember Donna talking about Rancho Nuevo? Well the international program to monitor and protect Kemps Ridleys there has fallen apart and this is really scary for the future of Kemps. While it’s absolutely fantastic the tiny turtle is coming back to the Chandelurs and other parts of the US, the motherland for Kemps Ridleys is the Rancho Nuevo area of Mexico, for Kemps to survive, that area needs to once again be protected.
But I want to end on more good news: so what about the future of the Chandeleurs? Todd said things are looking very good. He said the design phase should wrap up next fall and construction phase will begin soon after. The budget for the entire project is around $380 million dollars and he is optimistic they will have the funds to complete this project. And the Kemps Ridleys nesting here are relying on it. Without the restoration the pace of erosion and land loss paints a very dire future. But Todd says if they can complete restoration he is very optimistic about the future of Kemps Ridley nesting on the Chandeleurs for several decades.
But without it, the pace of erosion and land loss paints a very dire future for the abundance and quality of nesting habitat on the island.
