Kemp’s Ridley sea turtles, also known as Atlantic Ridleys, are the most endangered species of sea turtle in the world and they’re facing an increasingly serious problem off the coast of New England.
They keep getting swept into Cape Cod by strong currents, as Axios notes, and when they can’t warm themselves up, they get cold-stunned and are thrown around and into things by the waves. In an effort to stop them from getting so battered by waves and rocks, there is now a multi-state collaborative effort in place to save them. The goal is to rescue the chilly turtles from the waters of Cape Cod before they can get too hurt, and then to rehabilitate them and release them back onto their migratory path.
The turtles migrate to Mexico to lay their eggs. Once the babies are hatched, they make their way out into the water. There, they hide out in floating masses of seaweed until they get big enough to fend for themselves. The assumption is that most of the hatchlings stay in the Gulf of Mexico. However, since tracking hatchlings is incredibly difficult, there’s also a chance a number of them are being swept into the Gulf Stream and end up going north. When they reach somewhere between three and five years of age, they start migrating toward a place near New England called the Gulf of Maine. It’s right before they get there that the problems happen.
Cape Cod has a strong, hook-shaped current that reaches out into the ocean. It snags passing turtles and pulling them into the colder waters. The only way out of the Cape Cod currents is to head north, which is exactly where the turtles don’t want to go. They want and need to go south, which only makes the problem worse, according to Kate Sampson, the sea turtle stranding coordinator for the NOAA.
The further in the turtles get swept while in pursuit of escaping Cape Cod and continuing south, the colder the water gets. They try to warm themselves up in the shallows. When that doesn’t work, their blood gets too cold for them to be able to move and they get cold-stunned, just like the iguanas in Florida in early January, according to the Chicago Tribune.
Even though it’s a good thing that the populations of these turtles are finally on the rise after a very rough patch between 1978-1991 where only 200 turtles were laying eggs each year, their population growth is still precarious. There was a mass die-off during 2010 as well and even though it’s not confirmed, the timing makes it so there’s a very good chance it’s connected to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. The increasing number of turtles is also a potential reason for the increase in cold-stunned turtles; there are more of them, so there’s more of a chance that they get swept into the current.
The other reason is, obviously, climate change. The Gulf of Maine is reportedly warming faster than almost anywhere else on earth, and the warm water is probably what’s drawing the turtles there, even in the face of a somewhat precarious journey. The warming water also encourages them to linger on their journey, which increases their chances of being caught by the cooling waters when they delay too long.
“Our ultimate goal is to be able to find these turtles sitting on the bottom, before they get injured washing in,” says Bob Prescott, director of the Massachusetts Audubon Wellfleet Bay Wildlife Sanctuary. That way, they will be able to avoid the turtles becoming injured when they get tossed around by the waves. Some of them end up losing an eye or even getting their shells cracked by sharp rocks. Their first step is to be able to get the timing down of what they do between hatching and making their way to the Gulf of Maine.