PALM BEACH POST (Florida) 27 December 05 On the front lines with the turtle sentries (Lona O'Connor)
His back to the sparkling surf, Kirt Rusenko is down on his knees digging a hole in the sand with his bare hands. He's doing a pretty good imitation of a mother turtle. Rather than laying eggs, however, he is digging them up.
After about 55 days in the warm darkness 3 feet beneath the beach, dozens of baby turtles should have hatched by now and started scrambling, all dusted with sand, toward the ocean a few yards in front of them.
It's time to check how many hatchlings survived, how many didn't.
This is grim work. When nesting season officially ended Nov. 30, only 485 loggerheads had made nests, the second-lowest number since nest counting began.
"We know it's something in the ocean," Rusenko said. "Long-line fishing is taking the last of the adults."
Despite turtle exclusion devices now mandated on deep-sea fishing nets, the mortality rate is increasing.
Other news is more hopeful. The number of nests made by rare and endangered green turtles and leatherbacks is on the upswing. The greens laid 115 nests in Boca Raton this summer, up from 66 last year. The number of leatherback nests also increased, from five in 2004 to 18 this year.
The improvement in green turtle nesting probably is the result of "head start" programs in the gulf and Caribbean that raise young greens for several years in protected areas. The green turtles then have a better chance of living to an age when they can mate and lay eggs.
Sea turtles have been protected by state and federal laws since the 1970s, after their numbers had declined so dramatically that extinction loomed.
But those laws would have little meaning without Rusenko and a small but dedicated line of sentries along Florida's coastline, making make sure the laws are followed. These turtle sentries take in turtles wounded by fishing line and human debris in the ocean. They examine dead turtles that wash ashore, searching for cause of death.
Rusenko's squad of assistants usually are graduate students in marine studies, from as close as Florida Atlantic University and as far away as Italy. Marine studies students also patrol the beaches each morning and work in the FAU lab at the Gumbo Limbo Environmental Complex, where dozens of saved hatchlings swim energetically in seawater tanks until they are big enough to try their luck on the big lottery known as the Atlantic Ocean.
Rangy and tanned, wearing his trademark wide-brimmed hat, Rusenko would look as much at home on a tractor as he does jockeying an all-terrain vehicle down the beach. Also like a farmer, he is taciturn and focused on hard realities. Like the turtles, he continues to do his work, despite setbacks and without complaint.
He scoops out a double handful of sand and sniffs for the unmistakable sharp odor of baby turtles. He digs and sniffs some more, until his arm is buried up to the armpit in sand.
This is no job for a dilettante. From May to November, turtle nesting season, he starts searching the beach at first light. In between, there is record-keeping, with copies to state and federal agencies.
Rusenko trained as a biochemist and worked with rare genetic skin diseases of humans. Now he wryly reflects that it took him 10 years in marine conservation to reach a salary close to its previous level. But this is not the kind of work you do for the money, fame or glamour.
At worst, this job is to document the slow but steady disappearance of these gentle reptiles from the coast of Florida and the face of the Earth.
He earned a Ph.D. in zoology and worked at the turtle research center at the St. Lucie power plant before coming to Gumbo Limbo, where his official title is marine conservationist. He is one of the few people authorized by the stringent federal regulations to handle sea turtles who are stranded, found by boaters, washed ashore or need rehabilitation.
More than 45 sea turtles were stranded this summer from Boynton Beach to Boca Raton, the area Rusenko oversees. Their injuries included propeller cuts from collisions with boats and something called "lethargic loggerhead syndrome," which may be caused by pollutants in the water.
Entering the beach as a crescent moon rises in the east, the John Deere six-wheelers head in opposite directions, one south to the Boca Raton Inlet, the other north to the city limits.
They are searching for the U-shaped tracks that start at the waterline, end with a new nest and then curve back to the water. These indicate that a turtle has laid a clutch of 50 to 150 eggs. The turtle watchers mark off these nests with unmistakable orange stakes and orange tape.
They put dates on the stakes and sprinkle hot pepper powder on the sand to discourage raccoons and foxes, who dig up the newly laid eggs and eat the yolks for their rich protein stores. Even that technique is losing its effectiveness.
"A few raccoons are acquiring a taste for it," Rusenko said.
Even plants prey on turtle nests, their roots boring holes into the eggs and sucking the moisture out of them.
Rusenko drives along the waterline at breakneck speed. Then, spotting something, he halts and hops out. He reads auguries in the sand with the skills of a soothsayer.
He can tell the difference between a track made by a green turtle and one made by a loggerhead, though they look identical to an untrained eye. He can read the faintest scratch marks in the sand and tell when hatchlings were befuddled by streetlights and headed not into the sea, where they belong, but into the dunes to die.
Somewhere back in time, when the seas teemed with turtles, all these predators served the purpose of keeping turtles' teeming numbers under control. Now, each saved hatchling is a treasure.
This is hot, gritty, smelly work. Each egg, or empty shell, is examined and added up: hatched eggs, infertile eggs, eggs eaten by predators. Hungry ants and flies gather.
But on this particular morning, Rusenko scoops out handfuls of wriggling live loggerhead hatchlings, 25 of them. Though they are captives in a 5-gallon bucket, the hatchlings continue flailing like mad in their instinct-driven rush to the sea.
Even this happy find is tinged with doom. Only one in 1,000 hatchlings survives long enough to reproduce, so most or all of these sturdy little newborns, striving for life, are statistically already dead.
Rusenko and his students understand they cannot save every turtle. They cannot bulldoze the oceanfront condos. They cannot shoot out streetlights.
What they can do is give the nestlings a break.
Now, with the sun up, 2-inch long turtles scuttling on the sand are easy for sea birds to spot and eat.
After sunset, a researcher will bring the bucket to a dark spot at the edge of the ocean. Once in the sand again, the hatchlings pause to get their bearings, locating the tiny sparkle of light on the waves. That's their cue to scamper down to the surf, which picks them up and, with luck, carries them out to seaweed beds where they can float and eat and grow during the next 10 to 20 years. Then they will gather near the nesting ground and mate.
Many years later, the females will come ashore to lay their eggs, often within a few yards of where they were hatched.
The sea turtles' life cycle continued undisturbed for 15 million years, until humans began commercially fishing the ocean and decided to build homes with an ocean view. In the past 50 years, turtle numbers have dropped disastrously low. Green turtles, leatherbacks, Kemp's ridleys, olive ridleys and hawksbills are all on the endangered list.
So far, only the numbers of loggerhead turtles were sufficient to be called threatened, a less restrictive designation. That also means they are the only turtles that can be approached on the summer turtle walks organized by naturalists.
Still, naturalists catch people riding the pregnant females. There are still human predators who dig up the eggs to eat or to sell for their reputed virility-enhancing properties.
Loggerheads used to be the most prolific breeders on the Atlantic beaches of South Florida. Back in 1990, they dug 1,100 nests, more than twice as many as this year's paltry count. When people ask Rusenko if the plague of hurricanes in 2004 and 2005 have caused the troubling decrease in nests, he answers, "Hurricanes don't kill turtles, people kill turtles."
Specifically, it's long-line fishing that's been killing turtles for decades. Since 1987, commercial deep-sea fishermen have been required to use turtle excluder devices, known as TEDs.
But turtles live decades before reaching the age when they can mate and reproduce. During those decades before the TEDs were mandated, generations of turtles were strangled or drowned in deep-sea fishing nets.
On his morning rounds, Rusenko records the latitude and longitude of each nest he finds. He is using a combination of global positioning system technology and computer software normally used to track crimes by location.
The maps show the greatest concentration of nests and the places where they are scarce. The maps vividly show that the mother turtles do not come ashore to nest where night lighting is the greatest.
One example is the south end of Boca Raton's beach, where the glow from Broward County is brightest. On the north end of the beach, where the city of Boca Raton installed special lighting fixtures on A1A just south of Spanish River Boulevard, the concentration of nests is the greatest.
Condominium managers along A1A have been receptive to his explanation of why they should remove excess decorative lighting and replace bright white lights with yellow or low-wattage bulbs that do not confuse the turtles.
The city of Boca Raton installed the turtle-friendly light fixtures near Spanish River Boulevard.
What hopes Rusenko has, he places in the children who visit the Gumbo Limbo turtle tanks or watch nesting turtles or hatchling releases. He figures that every kid who has his photo taken by the big fiberglass turtle models outside Gumbo Limbo is a potential future ally.
And he has faith in the turtles themselves.
"It's fascinating to see how resilient these animals are," he said.
On the front lines with the turtle sentries