SUN-SENTINEL (Fort Lauderdale, Florida) 06 February 05 Gopher tortoises decline as builders pay to kill them (Kevin Spear)
Tallahassee: During the lean times of the Great Depression, a gopher tortoise was good for a pound or two of meat for hungry Floridians.
Called "Hoover chickens" after the president, they were picked clean from some areas.
Now, a more relentless assault could lead to the reptile's widespread disappearance, experts say. Though a protected species, gopher tortoises are routinely -- and legally -- slaughtered under the blades of developers' bulldozers.
Since the early 1990s, developers have paid the state, in the form of money or land, to "take" about 68,000 of the tortoises at housing, shopping, school, road, golf, prison and other building sites.
Orange County, rich in tortoises and churning with development, leads Florida's counties in the carnage, with 7,269 permitted for death, according to records from the state's wildlife agency.
"It's planned and permitted killing that's really appalling," said Matt Aresco, a turtle and tortoise biologist in Tallahassee who recently learned of the total. "You can't find a more gentle, slow-moving animal that goes about life without bothering anybody."
The records document how the fate of the tortoises has been tied to the transformation of Central Florida's scrubland, pine forest and sandy rises. For example:
The developer of the Avalon Park community in east Orange County set aside 170 acres for wildlife habitat in exchange for a permit to kill 715 tortoises.
It cost $113,936 for a permit to kill 128 tortoises for development of Fountain Parke at Lake Mary.
To obtain a permit for 300 tortoises, a private Osceola County landfill signed over hundreds of acres for conservation.
Walt Disney Co. also set aside chunks of habitat for a permit to kill 3,254 tortoises at the Celebration project and other developments. Disney officials said that so far, about 400 tortoises have been moved within Disney property, and none has been killed.
State officials acknowledge they don't know how many tortoises legally have been killed. The permits are based on estimates, and there's little reporting required for what developers ultimately do with their permits.
Few dispute, though, that tens of thousands of tortoises have perished.
Some gopher tortoises escape bulldozers by going deeper into their burrows -- only to be entombed, for example, under a new home's foundation. They can wither for months.
"They die slowly of starvation and suffocation," said Rebecca Eagan, a Winter Park environmental activist and devotee of tortoises.
To ecologists, the horror goes beyond individual tortoises. Also living in their tunnel-like burrows are 360 species, including indigo snakes and burrowing owls, both of which are protected species.
According to the state wildlife agency, tortoises now number about 700,000, an estimate strongly disputed by other experts as far too low or too high.
Whoever is right, gopher tortoises owe their numbers, in part, to living as long as people. But they are among the slowest of Florida wildlife to reproduce. Not until females are about 20 years old do they produce eggs.
"This is not an animal that bounces back easily," said Gainesville-based Joan Berish, a well-known Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission authority on tortoise biology.
The commission has proposed changing its designation of tortoises as a species of special concern to the more dire status of a species threatened with extinction.
That promises to be a difficult exercise, coming later this year, with the outcome potentially having a huge but still-unknown effect on rules protecting tortoises.
Under current protections, evolving since the 1980s, developers must survey their parcels to determine the number and location of tortoises. State rules then offer two main options to deal with the tortoises: moving the creatures or bulldozing them. Both are expensive.
The price developers pay for killing tortoises is based on the acreage of their habitat that is destroyed by a building project. In Central Florida, the payment often works out to be about $1,000 a tortoise.
The permitted killing of 68,000 tortoises statewide has brought in about $40 million in "blood money," as one environmentalist called it. The cash has been used to buy nine parcels covering 9,000 acres statewide.
The land, including the Split Oak property, which straddles Orange and Osceola counties, will be managed for protection of gopher tortoises and other wildlife.
Biologists and managers at the Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission think setting aside land is the most certain way of ensuring the survival of tortoises. They are far less optimistic about moving tortoises.
A widespread public perception about gopher tortoises is that most of them in harm's way are packed off to a new habitat.
The wildlife agency's records tell a different story. Since 1989, agency officials have handed out permits for relocating about 38,000 tortoises, slightly more than half the number permitted for killing.
Developers can find tortoises a home on another part of their development tract and then legally declare that area forever protected from building. That usually works only for the biggest projects, which have ample space.
Far more common is to move the reptiles to another private parcel.
Early on, agency officials say, moving tortoises had favorable results because there was a lot of remote, undisturbed land still available. Soon, though, the agency grew discouraged with relocation for a number of reasons.
One was the increasing likelihood that some or most of the parcels where gopher tortoises have been given a second chance will someday become a proposed development site.
"The end game is that all developable land will some day be developed," said Thomas Eason, a state wildlife-agency section leader for species conservation in Tallahassee. "We are getting to the point where there are no good places to move gopher tortoises to."
A high-profile example of double jeopardy for tortoises came at the University of Central Florida, where leaders in the 1990s sought to build fraternity and sorority houses on about 25 acres that hosted relocated tortoises.
A protracted battle between UCF and environmentalists finally was resolved last year by Gov. Jeb Bush and his Cabinet, who set aside 17 acres of the tract for tortoise habitat.
Other experts say relocation doesn't work because it is too often done badly.
"It's been a joke, at best a humanitarian gesture," said Ray Ashton, a tortoise conservationist and consultant in the Gainesville area.
Not only are relocation lands not protected from development, Ashton said, but developers are under minimal requirements to ensure or even monitor the survival of tortoises that have been moved.
The state Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission has assigned 21 of its staff to study and propose how to better handle the moving of tortoises threatened by development. The group's final report to agency senior managers is expected in coming weeks.
To the agency, the permitted eradication of gopher tortoises isn't as much of a concern as the swift rate at which development gobbles up and permanently destroys the high, dry, sandy-soil terrain where they live.
"My much higher priority is to develop a strategy so that we can maintain enough habitat that our grandchildren can have gopher tortoises as part of the part flora and fauna of Florida," said Frank Montalbano, the commission's deputy director for species conservation.
"That's where this battle will be won or lost."
Gopher tortoises decline as builders pay to kill them