They were all but extinct. Now there are so many that scientists need your help tracking and studying them as they spread upriver.
“Whereas 20 years ago, we had very few numbers of turtles in our local waters, now we're seeing turtles in nooks and crannies, in areas that we've never seen them before,” said Jeffrey Seminoff, who leads the Marine Turtle Ecology and Assessment Program at NOAA’s Southwest Fisheries Science Center.
After about 55 days, their babies emerge and steadily get picked off by predators like birds, crabs and raccoons along the beaches. The survivors make their way into the open ocean where they’ll spend the next four years or so passively floating. With yet more predators prowling the seas, the best estimate is that only about 1% of them make it to adulthood.
They were put on the U.S. federal endangered species list in the 1970s. And by the 1990s, Mexico had taken steps to both protect nesting sites and foraging populations, and ban the sale and use of turtle products.Back in the 1980s, roughly 250 turtles were spotted on Playa Colola in Michoacán over the six-month-long nesting season. In 2015, more than 1,000 were spotted in one night, Seminoff said.
Now, they're showing up in surprising numbers, farther up the San Gabriel River than was previously observed. There are plenty of rock piles for algae to grow and mud for invertebrates to flourish in, both of which are critical sources of food.Justin Greenman, the California Assistant Stranding Coordinator at NOAA.
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