Please help us save the turtles! Headstart was created to put more turtles back out into the ocean and it worked! But NMFS stopped the program! Please help us get it back into action!
For 22 years the National Marine Fisheries Service(NMFS) Galveston Laboratory has joined with Mexico in an effort to preserve the Kemp's Ridley sea turtle. The people at NMFS Galveston Sea Turtle Facility have worked with the team on the HeadStart program for the turtles. They were proud to share the resources with the public and were happy to see all the support over the past years.
The HeadStart project started in 1978 and was supposed to end 10 years later when Turtle Excluder Devices (TED) were required in 1989 in shrimp nets. BUT, the program was abruptly canceled in 1992 which was just 3 years after the TEDs were introduced. Many claimed that HeadStart wasn't working....some said that the turtles weren't adapting well after being in captivity, that they couldn't find food and that they weren't making it to the nesting beaches.. Others stated that captive rearing and subsequent release of endangered animals was a poor conservation program. But, the fact is, many other endangered animals went through cative rearing at some point also: black-footed ferret, gray wolf, bison, elk, condor. What made it so wrong for the sea turtles?
February of 2001, the permit of the program expired that allowed the import of Kemp's Ridleys. The NMFS Galveston Sea Turtle Facility requested a renewal of the permit in July of 2000. They wrote up some answers to concerns and submitted it to the Southeast Regional Office on the NMFS but the document never left the SE Regional Office.....
The thing is, this program did work! The turtles did return a few years later. But the NMFS refused to start the program back up.
Many turtles are dying before our eyes. Not just the endangered ones.
Are you going to help us Restart the HeadStart program??
