PORT ST. JOE, Fla. — Biologist Lorna Patrick dug gingerly into the beach Friday, gently brushing away sand to reveal dozens of leathery, golfball-size loggerhead sea turtle eggs.
Patrick, of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, plucked the eggs from the foot-deep hole and placed them one by one in a cooler layered with moist sand from the nest, the first step in a sweeping and unprecedented evacuation to save thousands of threatened hatchlings from certain death in the oiled Gulf of Mexico.
After about 90 minutes of parting the sand with her fingers like an archaeologist at a dig, she had placed 107 eggs in two coolers and loaded them onto a FedEx temperature-controlled truck. They are being transported to a warehouse at Florida’s Kennedy Space Center, where they will incubate and, it is hoped, hatch before the hatchlings are released into the Atlantic Ocean.
The effort began in earnest along Florida’s Panhandle, with two loggerhead nests excavated. Up to 800 more nests across Alabama and Florida beaches will be dug up in the coming months in an attempt to move about 70,000 eggs.
Scientists fear that if left alone, the hatchlings would emerge and swim into the oil, where most would likely die, killing off a generation of an already imperiled species.
“This is a giant experiment,” said Jeff Trandahl, director of the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, which helped organize the plan.
Trandahl acknowledged that the move might kill many of the hatchlings but said there was no other option.
Each nest is monitored from the moment it is made and left in place for about 50 days. Then the eggs will be taken to the NASA temperature-controlled warehouse, kept at roughly 85 degrees, where they should begin hatching within about 10 days or so of arrival.
The hope is that the ones that survive will return to nest where they were born after about 30 years, but no one knows whether the experiment will be successful.
FedEx has offered to transport the eggs free of charge. Virginia Albanese, CEO of Fed Ex Custom Critical, said the company will continue the effort for about four months, averaging three 500-mile trips a week from the Panhandle to Cape Canaveral.
Loggerhead turtles typically lay about 125 eggs per nest. The government has no way of knowing exactly how many of the species live in the gulf but use nest numbers to determine population health.
Fish and Wildlife has proposed increasing loggerhead protections under federal law from those of a threatened species to those applicable to an endangered species, largely because nest numbers have been steadily declining over the years.
Even without an oil spill, the vast majority of hatchlings don’t make it to maturity, in part because they’re eaten by predators. Experts estimate about one out of 1,000 survives to reproduce.
