FLORIDA TODAY (Melbourne) 18 September 06 Groups seek to spare tortoises harm (Jim Waymer)
They suffocate, starve or dehydrate under fresh pavement and foundations. Some claw their way out. Others take months to die.
Florida allows bulldozing over gopher tortoise burrows to make way for new homes, roads and businesses. But local conservationists want Brevard officials to revoke that license to kill and rescue the roughly 1,000 tortoises buried alive or displaced annually in this county.
On Tuesday, a representative of almost 20 environmental groups will ask county commissioners to ban the practice of burying gopher tortoises and their eggs and burrows. The groups want officials instead to identify public lands where tortoises could be relocated.
"People don't even realize that they do this," said Maureen Rupe, president of Partnership for a Sustainable Future, an umbrella environmental organization. "Some of these bulldozers cut them in half. It is such a horrific thing to do."
Conservationists hope Brevard will take over site inspections of projects that destroy tortoise habitat, a function they say state wildlife officials have failed to adequately perform. They also say the county could collect the mitigation fees that state wildlife officials have used in the past to buy tortoise habitat outside Brevard.
But county officials say that even if commissioners banned tortoise "entombment," they aren't sure where to put as many as 1,000 tortoises killed or displaced each year by development.
"There is no way, even if we had several sites in each region, that we could accommodate that many tortoises," said Mike Knight, director of the Environmentally Endangered Lands program.
Too many relocated tortoises might push existing conservation lands beyond what the habitat can sustain, he said, lowering diversity of species.
In the past 15 years, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission allowed an estimated 75,000 tortoises to be killed to make way for development. The species is thought to number about 700,000 in Florida, about 10 percent of its numbers a century ago.
The conservationists want Brevard and other counties to take over permitting of how to handle tortoises on construction sites because most die on small projects, such as single-family homes that bury or displace tortoises without ever getting a permit.
"It's the hundreds of tiny ones that are slipping in under the radar," said Ray Ashton, president of the Ashton Biodiversity, Research and Preservation Institute. "Very rarely does anybody get busted for it. There's just not enough game wardens out there to catch this stuff."
Ashton says a county-run program could provide incentives for farmers to maintain tortoise habitat on pastureland.
In June, Florida wildlife commissioners voted to reclassify the gopher tortoise from "of special concern" to "threatened." The change, which could take effect within the next few years, triggered state biologists to begin rewriting the rules for building on tortoise habitat.
But relocation remains difficult, time-consuming and far from a panacea, biologists say. Tortoises must be carefully dug up with backhoes that can accidentally kill the animal. Each one relocated needs up to a half-acre of habitat.
And given last year's 969 tortoises displaced by development in Brevard, the county would need to find 300 to 350 acres a year for relocations, which could be costly.
"That would be a very large acquisition program for the county to take on," said Virginia Barker, a supervisor with the county's Natural Resources Management Office.
Some level of "incidental take" would probably be unavoidable, county officials said.
"What we have to be really careful about is that we don't adopt an ordinance that is unenforceable," Barker said.
Why they struggle
- Gopher tortoises take a long time to reach sexual maturity and lay only about 10 eggs every few years. Statistically, only one of those eggs results in a tortoise that survives longer than a year.
- In the past century, gopher tortoises lost 9.2 million of the 10.8 million acres they once lived on, an 85 percent decline. Just 1.6 million acres of their sandy habitat remains.
- In the past 15 years, Florida permitted an estimated 67,000 to 75,000 "incidental takes" of gopher tortoises, which allow developers to build among them, with unknown consequences.
- Beyond those buried, many more tortoises die at the hands of well-meaning people. They put wayward tortoises in their cars and drop them off at parks or ranches, where the creatures wander onto roads again and get hit by cars. Or severely sick tortoises spread disease into healthy populations.
Rule to protect them
- In June, Florida wildlife commissioners decided to up the gopher tortoises' status from "of special concern" to "threatened." The change becomes official in about a year after the state develops a new management plan for the species.
- A petition to list federally as threatened has been submitted.
- Developers have five options in dealing with gopher habitat: don't develop the site; avoid burrows by at least 25 feet; get a permit that allows entombing or killing tortoises; relocate them to similar habitat purchased elsewhere; with five or fewer tortoises, catch and pen them on the site until construction is complete.
-- Florida Fish and WildlifeConservation Commission
Groups seek to spare tortoises harm