AP, BBC, Miami Herald..: Finally, action on gulf spill. Turtle eggs to be dug up, hatched, set free in cleaner water.
Animal rescue stories are about the only way for reporters to cover the ongoing BP gulf oil spill and give readers something to feel at all good about. People do care – even if washing the oil off those birds saves few of them, rescuers will keep doing it. Ju-u-u-st … because. So word that tens of thousands of turtle eggs, now incubating in beach nests where clotted oil swirls in the water, will be dug up is a natural news item. Workers will take them, reportedly, to Cape Canaveral for further incubation in properly warm and humid conditions, then set the hatchlings free far from the spill.
Media seem to be reporting the story with reasonable care, including the downside of the plan to go with its inevitable awwww-cute-baby angle. Turtle eggs don’t take to handling well. But chances are high for a near-total year-class wipeout if they are left where their mothers, mostly loggerheads, put them. The move is going forward with coordination from the federal Fish and Wildlife Service and other agencies.
Less well reported, with exception noted below, is how well the turtles might fare in the long run by being let go so far from normal nesting areas.
Stories:
- AP – Brian Skoloff: Some 70,000 turtle eggs to be whisked far from oil. One quibble – no whisking allowed. Says right here one must avoid turning them over or jostling them much.
- Reuters – Steve Gorman: Plan hatched to move turtle eggs from oil spill ; Gorman reports this is not just unusual, but unprecedented.
- BBC – Turtle egg rescue plan announced ;
- Alabama Press-Register – Ryan Dezember: Wildlife officials to move thousands of sea turtle eggs to Florida’s east coast ; Kudos – there is reporting here. Dezember answers the right question. How will the baby turtles know, when they are grown and it is time to lay their own eggs, that the usual spot is along the Louisiana and Alabama shores? The answer from experts – natal imprinting – is unconvincing. But at least the topic is raised.
- CBS – Charles Cooper: Biologists Plan Massive Transfer of Turtle Eggs ;
- Miami Herald – Craig Pittman: Biologists to move sea turtle eggs east ;
- E&E Greenwire (via NYTimes) – Noelle Straub: U.S. Plans ‘Extraordinary Measures’ to Rescue Turtles Along Gulf Coast ;
On the other hand…
- Miami Herald – Curtis Morgan: Gulf of Mexico sea turtles may be burning with oil, groups plan to sue BP ; Hard to judge this piece without data, which it lacks (and says so). But one is sure the reporter let a hyperbolic quote in, from a turtle rescuer calling the possible incineration of turtles “The most inhumane thing I have ever heard…” Are there, one wonders, any rules of thumb in journalism to avoid quotes made in haste and not, um, true? Surely the woman has heard of things as, or more, inhumane than this.
Grist for the Mill:
Deepwater Horizon Response (joint agencies) Press Release ; Plan FAQ ; Official Relocation plan from which the pic above comes ;
- Charlie Petit
