Volunteers Rush to Move Turtle Eggs From Gulf to Atlantic

June 30, 2010 — -- Ragged with fatigue, female turtles flap onto the beaches of Gulf Shores, Ala. The 250-pound loggerheads have returned from Mexico to their Gulf Coast beaches where they were born, to give their offspring a chance at life.

The turtles have done this for thousands of generations, until now. In what the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is calling the largest man-made migration in U.S. history, over the next two weeks, crews will try to relocate every egg in every turtle nest they find in Alabama and the Florida Panhandle.

In this particular area, the majority of the turtles at risk are U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. There are also a handful of Kemp's ridley, green and leatherback sea turtles scattered on the beaches.

"We have oil in the water. We have oil on the beach. We have major obstacles with the cleanup operations," said Bonnie Strawser, a Fish and Wildlife spokeswoman. "Everything that's going on is something that sea turtle hatchlings have just not had to face in the past."

Strawser has been studying turtles for 31 years. She says if the eggs are allowed to hatch on these oiled beaches, an entire generation of turtles could die.

"We believe that any hatchlings that would crawl into the Gulf Coast at this point, would not survive," she said.

Nearly 70,000 eggs will be transported to Florida's Atlantic coast.

"This is an unprecedented event and has never occurred in the history of sea turtle conservation," said Jackie Isaacs, a wildlife biologist with Fish and Wildlife.

Isaacs agreed that the group that is tending to turtles at the Bon Secour National Wildlife Refuge in Alabama, is playing Mother Nature.

"It's a new role for us -- we would never move eggs in any other circumstance. Because of this oil spill, it's actually created an incident where ... if they were released into the waters, the majority would not make it."

The eggs will be packaged in temperature-controlled Styrofoam packaging and trucked in a specialized transport to Florida's east coast. After about 55 days of incubation -- most of that occurring on the beaches -- the eggs will hatch in the packaging, and the baby turtles will make their way through mesh openings at the top, into the Atlantic Ocean.