Turtle poacher sentenced

An Agat man arrested on Saturday for allegedly trying to sell an endangered green sea turtle has been sentenced to five months in prison for committing the exact same crime in 2008.

Convicted turtle poacher Roque Chargualaf Inocentes was re-sentenced on Tuesday, according to District Court of Guam records.

In May of 2008, Inocentes and three others were caught hunting turtles with spear guns, files state. Conservation officers caught them with a turtle that had been killed with a spear through the breastplate, files state.

Inocentes pleaded guilty to four months later and was sentenced to three years of probation, court documents state.

He was re-arrested on Saturday after one of the same conservation officers caught him allegedly attempting to sell a 25-pound turtle for $125. The turtle died because it was pieced through the neck, court documents state.

As a result, Inocentes was charged with "taking a threatened species" -- the same crime he pleaded guilty to in 2008.

Even with his recent arrest, Inocentes could have had his probation revoked. District Court files show a federal judge was considering sending Inocentes to prison for other reasons -- like testing positive for drug use and skipping drug tests -- before he was caught with the second turtle.

Lost Turtle Found At Otaki Beach

Massey University is scanning a critically ill green sea turtle that washed up on Otaki beach, a long way from her home in the tropics.

The 70-centimetre-long turtle was found by a member of the public Wednesday, with the animal taken to the university’s Manawatu campus, where she was discovered to be suffering from pneumonia and a fractured shell.

Usually, green sea turtles are to be found in tropical waters, its closest known habitat being Australia’s North Queensland coast, which is why the turtle was seen to be suffering from shock due to being in cold waters, according to wildlife veterinarian Kerri Morgan.

Vets have placed the turtle on an intravenous drip, including taping back her flippers to squeeze her through the CT scanner used for cats and dogs, normally.

Morgan says a lung biopsy will be carried out in a couple of day to find out what kind of pneumonia she is suffering from and how best it should be treated.

Once the turtle recovers, instead of deporting her to Australia which might prove difficult due to bio-security issues, she could be sent to an aquarium for rehabilitation.

Turtles are known to be quite resilient and it is possible, she might be able to swim home.

The Oil and the Turtles

Every year, Rancho Nuevo, 900 miles southwest of the Deepwater Horizon blowout, sees a spectacular phenomenon: the arribada—mass nesting—of the Kemp’s ridley sea turtle, which has already neared extinction. This year, thousands of baby ridleys swam off toward a deadly new enemy.

By Alex Shoumatoff•

Photograph by Gary Braasch

WEB EXCLUSIVE September 21, 2010

Ridley-turtle hatchlings head into the Gulf in Tamaulipas, Mexico.

Of all the devastation in the Gulf of Mexico caused by the Deepwater Horizon blowout, no one single species is being directly affected as much as the critically endangered Kemp’s ridley sea turtle. Only 8,000 adult females nested in 2009, and the adult males are thought to be even fewer. Those that remain have been hit hard. Most of the surviving juveniles inhabit the waters 20 to 30 miles from shore, feeding and growing in the same currents and gyres that collected the bulk of the four million barrels spewed by the now capped well. There were confirmed reports of ridleys being burned alive in the pools of corralled, concentrated oil that BP had been burning off during the spill.

Almost every gravid female ridley lays her eggs on a single beach in Tamaulipas, Mexico, coming ashore in a unique mass-nesting event known as the arribada—the arrival. Kemp’s cousins in the Pacific, the Olive ridleys, also do this, but the other five sea-turtle species (and a small percentage of ridleys) are solitary nesters and don’t always return to the same place. The arribadas happen at Rancho Nuevo—a beach 900 miles southwest from the blowout. It’s only 200 miles south of Brownsville, Texas. Not a bad drive, only I’m told it’s too dangerous because three warring factions of narcotrafficantes—the Gulf cartel, the Zetas (former hit men of the cartel), and a local mafia called La Maña—have been having shoot-outs along it. Instead, I fly to Tampico, the sleepy port where the opening scene of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre was filmed, which is 60 miles south of Rancho Nuevo. (Not that Tampico is immune to the violence; the week before I arrive, the naked bodies of five policemen were found hanging from one of its bridges, I am told by a fellow gringo who narrowly escaped being shaken down at one of the narcos’ impromptu roadblocks right in the city.) I’m met at the airport by two people from the federal agency that manages Mexico’s protected areas, and they whisk me to the nearby Hampton Inn for the night.

In the morning we are driven to the Rancho Nuevo beach reserve by its director Dr. Gloria Tavera. Its 20 miles of wild white sand are patrolled three times a day by guards on A.T.V.’s, and 20 times a day or more during nesting season. Dr. Tavera tells me that the arribadas are over, but that the white ping-pong-ball-size eggs, having incubated for 45 days, are starting to hatch.

Sure enough, at five a.m. on the second morning, we jump onto four-wheelers and bomb down to the South Corral, four miles from the camp, where dozens of the 800 nests from the June 3 arribada are erupting with hatchlings, about 90 per nest. The babies are three inches long and look like black rubber-toy turtles. They crawl down to the surf and, as soon as they hit the water, their angled forelimbs begin to flap wildly. Then they’re pulled into the breaking waves by the undertow and are off, on their own, into the great unknown. Guided by pure instinct, fueled by the remaining yoke in their waterproof belly sacs, they will swim straight out for five days or so until they hit the mats of sargassum, a golden-brown, free-floating marine algae (these lines of sargassum are often only 20 or 30 feet wide, but can extend for miles, and offer cover and food for the hatchlings). We don’t know how many hatchlings will survive to adulthood, but the most common ballpark estimate is only one in a thousand. Many will be picked off by sharks, many other species of fish, dolphins, and sea birds. Everything wants to eat them. But many more than usual will die when the clockwise currents of the Gulf carry the turtles directly up into the area contaminated by the Deepwater Horizon spill. “The internal damage from the hydrocarbons to the organs of the ridleys could make them unable to reproduce,” Dr. Tavera tells me. “That would mean extinction. But nobody knows.”

Her fears could be well founded. A new study of shorebirds finds that the ingestion of only a small amount of oil can cause lasting changes in brain function and behavior. The males’ pheromones are inhibited so they stop doing their mating behavior.

Conservationists rallied round the ridley in 1978, when human predation left them hanging by a thread. Poaching of the eggs—rich and delicious, they had long been part of the local diet—was stopped, and in l986, when only 600 females came back to nest at Rancho Nuevo, an American law was passed requiring shrimp fishermen meeting certain criteria to equip their nets with escape holes for turtles known as TEDs (turtle excluder devices). For a time, it was working. In 2009 there were 21,000 nests. Six thousand females came ashore over a two-day period that May, the biggest arribada in the 40-year history of the conservation program at Rancho Nuevo. But this year there were only 13,115 nests, the result of a record cold winter followed by three months of red tide, a toxic algae bloom that prevented the females from being able to access the beach. Then, on June 30, the beach was slammed by Hurricane Alex, and a thousand more nests were lost.

Barbara Schroeder, of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association in Silver Spring, Maryland, thinks the spill is unlikely to spell the end of the ridley but it “is definitely a setback to the turtle’s recovery. We are going to have to enhance our efforts to get the species back on the trajectory it was on, and we will need to re-look at the most significant human threats—bycatch from shrimp and other trawlers and gill nets, hook and line-fishing, and boat strikes.”

That the four million barrels of oil seem to be dissipating more quickly than expected does not mean the turtles will no longer be affected. The oil below the surface concerns many experts. Kemp’s ridleys in nearshore areas feed on the bottom, which means they have to dive through the oil. What’s more, this relatively quick disappearance of the large oil pools was achieved because BP dumped nearly two million gallons of the highly toxic chemical dispersant Corexit into the Gulf—in some cases, without the necessary approval of the Environmental Protection Agency. Corexit, used to break up large pools of oil in water, is an alarmingly unknown entity. Scientists in Louisiana are just beginning to study its effects on marine life in the Gulf. They’ve discovered high levels of it in blue-crab larvae, which suggests the poison may have already entered the food chain, just in time for the start of Louisiana’s shrimp season. Blue crabs are the ridley’s favorite food.

Ed Clark, the president of the Wildlife Center of Virginia, who has been treating oiled wildlife for 28 years, tells me that the dispersant is like “putting a coat of new paint on a junk car.” The official marine-life casualty numbers, Clark maintains, are grossly underestimated. “If they’re saying 400 turtles were killed, I’d bet my house it’s more like 4,000,” he says.

“BP is responsible for the damages”—up to $50,000 per turtle, as per the Endangered Species Act—“but it is incumbent on the government to prove what [the damages] are,” says Clark. He has heard rumors that the cleanup crews on Grand Isle, Louisiana, which are mainly made up of prisoners, were bagging dead turtles and birds in plastic bags marked for incineration because no one from Fish and Wildlife responded to their calls. The F.W.S. agents were mainly focused on federally owned coastline. It may go beyond unresponsive government agencies. Clark also heard rumors that BP was deliberately burning oiled sargassum, even though living sea turtles were known to be still in the floating mats.

So the crisis isn’t over, as BP and the government would have you believe. It’s only beginning. The biological consequences of this disaster will be felt for years, over generations, like Chernobyl. And we may never know how bad it was.

Vancouver Aquarium volunteers help sea turtles recover from Gulf oil spill

By Rhiannon Coppin, Vancouver Sun September 13, 2010 3:20 PM

At the Audubon Institute in Gretna, La., sea turtles suspected of swallowing oil spilled from the Deepwater Horizon rig are being fed mayonnaise and vegetable oils to help purge their digestive tracts.

To treat their exteriors, volunteers like Chelsea DeColle use Dawn soap, just as the television commercials claim. "It's the No. 1 detergent used to clean oil off oiled animals," she said.

DeColle, a 30-year-old veterinary technician on loan from the Vancouver Aquarium, tended to each of 167 turtles in her two-week volunteer stint at the Audubon centre in August.

Staff and volunteers repeatedly went through the same lists of animals -- the bulk of them green sea turtles -- checking their weights, appetites, wound-healing, medications and blood profiles, and sometimes taking radiographs. "Day to day was fairly similar," DeColle said.

The youngest and smallest patient, at one pound, was a two-year-old green sea turtle. The largest was a lone loggerhead of unknown age. Hawksbill and Kemp's Ridley turtles rounded out the temporary collection.

"Most of them were in fairly good condition and we were just maintaining them so that they could gain weight and meet all the criteria for release," DeColle said.

There were exceptions. One turtle that wasn't eating on its own was stressed at being fed through a throat tube. "The doctors ended up placing a tube that sticks out of the neck but actually goes to the esophagus through the skin," she said.

The skin was stitched up around the tube and the tube was glued to the shell, to make feeding a simple matter of injecting fish mush into the tube.

DeColle also visited with a bottlenose dolphin. "I got to participate in one procedure with it. We had to go in the water and actually take the dolphin out to put it on a scale and take blood samples," she said.

The additional training DeColle received and her exposure to new animals, procedures and people is a "win-win" for the Gulf Coast and for British Columbia, said Dr. Martin Haulena, 43, a veterinarian who helms the Vancouver Aquarium's mammal care team. Four staff veterinary technicians will each spend two weeks on the rescue effort.

"Certainly the animals and the people directly involved in the Gulf are benefiting from the expertise of some of the best vet techs anywhere," he said. "On the flip side, they're making friends and contacts and firming up relationships with other experts."

And should a marine oil disaster strike in B.C. waters, those connections will be vital.

Haulena's career experience has taken him to the front of many marine oil spills, mainly in California, where he worked for nine years, but also to the birthplace of the theory of evolution -- Ecuador's Galapagos Islands -- following a fuel-tanker spill in 2001 that killed many marine iguanas.

"There was a good amount of oil that could have potentially devastated one of the worlds' most beloved ecological reserves," Haulena said. "To have that kind of place affected by a man-made accident is a big deal."

An oil spill in B.C. would be an equally big deal, he said. Animals that use feathers or fur for insulation or buoyancy would be most affected. On the coast, an oil spill could wipe out flocks of migratory birds. It could kill many sea otters and other mammals, as we've seen on the Alaskan coast.

During DeColle's stint, 25 turtles gained enough weight to be released.

Project Orion 2 video

Hi guys,

just to share some video we have just received from the video cam. enjoy..

Hot day in Sungei Buloh Wetland Reserve!

Greetings to all readers!

Project Orion II team members made their way to Sungei Buloh Wetland Reserve (SBWR) after a long break from the overseas trip! It was a day to get dirty and wet, not forgetting to mention getting sunburn too!


After everyone gathered at the isolated compound, everyone was given a short briefing and introduction by one of the staffs over there. Then we proceeded to our destination which was very far away from the information centre. However, no one complained and in fact, enjoyed themselves!


The scouts were given another briefing on what to do for the next few hours, which included picking up of rubbish, planting of mangroves. It was a no-brainer picking up thrash on the beach but strict instructions were made known to everyone to ensure that the plants were carefully planted into the muddy ground.

The team sincerely hopes that everyone who participated in this event brought back valuable experiences and knowledge where they can share with their friends and family members regarding environmental conservation!

As what our founder said, 'Leave this world a little better than you found it'. That is what everyone did and you can do it too!

Scientists Say New Turtle Species Found

PASCAGOULA, Miss. – Scientists say they've found a new species of turtle in the Pearl River, and they've named it, aptly enough, the Pearl map turtle.

For a long time, scientists believed the Pascagoula map turtle was alone in the Pascagoula and Pearl rivers. That changed with the findings by Jeff Lovich and Josh Ennen, both with the U.S. Geological Survey.

The Pearl map turtle is 57th turtle species native to the United States and the 13th map turtle. Twenty-nine species can be found in Mississippi.

Lovich's research in 1992 led to his discovery of the Pascagoula map turtle and the Escambia map turtle, which is found in the Escambia River system. He told The Mississippi Press that he had noticed "very subtle differences between the turtles that lived in the Pearl and Pascagoula" rivers while doing research in the 1990s.

"I thought, 'Well, I'll leave those for somebody else to work out,"' he said.

That somebody was Ennen, who works for Lovich at the USGS Southwest Biological Science Center in Flagstaff, Ariz. Ennen discovered the Pearl map turtle while doing research on map turtle species for his doctorate at the University of Southern Mississippi.

Lovich said Ennen called him and said new genetic data showed differences between the Pascagoula and Pearl map turtles.

"The differences between the turtles in the Pearl and Pascagoula were significant and he wanted to know if I wanted to team up with him and run my analyses based on color pattern, measurements of the shell and those sorts of things and combine the data with his new genetic information based on DNA and we did that," Lovich said.

"The results were clear. They were definitely different species," Lovich said.

Lovich said the United States is a "turtle hot spot as far as biodiversity. The only countries that have turtles with the same biodiversity would be places like China and India."

The female Pearl map turtle is about dinner-plate-sized and the male is tea-saucer-sized, he said. The larger females can use their jaws to crush open clams while the smaller males eat mostly insects and fish.

Lovich said map turtles get their name from yellow lines on their shells that resemble roads on a map. The Pearl map turtle has an unbroken black stripe on its shell while the Pascagoula map turtle's stripe is broken, he said. The Pearl map turtle has less yellow coloring in its shell than its Pascagoula cousin, he said.

"The neat thing about rivers in the southeast United States, all the ones that drain into the Gulf of Mexico, they have amazing biodiversity," Lovich said. "In fact, Alabama probably has more species of clams, fish, crayfish, turtles than just about any place on earth."

He said rising and falling sea levels led to species being separated and joined over tens of thousands of years.

"It is a kind of a laboratory for evolution, if you will," Lovich said.

De-oiled turtles given new lease on life in the Gulf

Assorted wildlife and law agencies pooled resources Tuesday to release 42 de-oiled Kemp's ridley sea turtles that were victims of the recent northern Gulf of Mexico spill.

The turtles were gently placed into the Gulf waters about five miles from Goodland by members of agencies, including the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, the Audubon Nature Institute, Mote Marine Laboratory, SeaWorld in Orlando, Walt Disney World and Clearwater Marine Aquarium.

Veterinarian Dr. Kara Field had the whole mission close to her heart. Having traveled down from New Orleans after assisting with de-oiling for the past couple of months, she said most of the turtles were found off the coast of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida.

“The first oiled turtle that was picked up from the spill came into Louisiana on May 18,” she said. “Since then, we’ve probably received about 100 turtles before most of the other places starting receiving them, so we got a lot of the really densely oiled animals.”

She said the oil completely covered their eyes and mouths, and was actually on their corneas, compromising their vision.

Field said it wasn’t a case of disoriented turtles washing up conveniently for de-oiling.

“We waited for a while … we thought we’d start seeing turtles coming in, but they didn’t, so NOAA and Fish & Wildlife made a decision to go out and actively look for them,” Field said.

According to NOAA, the turtles are the smallest in the world, weighing on average around 100 pounds. The turtles released Tuesday were about two years old and weighed 10 pounds.

“We were pretty shocked at how oiled they were,” Field said, “We had to used gauze to swab out their mouths. But we only lost three out of 194 animals.

The release area was chosen because it’s known that turtles favor the area, Field said.