Bastard Turtle
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The origin of \"ridley\" is a subject of speculation. Prior to being known as ridleys, French naturalist Bernard Germain de Lacépède referred to the Lepidochelys species as \"bastard turtles.\" Renowned sea turtle conservationist Archie Carr claimed that \"ridley\" was a common Floridan term, quite possibly, a dialectic corruption of \"riddle.\"[1]
Kemp's ridley sea turtle[4] (Lepidochelys kempii), also called the Atlantic ridley sea turtle, is the rarest species of sea turtle and is the world's most endangered species of sea turtle. It is one of two living species in the genus Lepidochelys (the other one being L. olivacea, the olive ridley sea turtle).
At least one source also refers to Kemp's ridley as a \"heartbreak turtle\". In her book The Great Ridley Rescue, Pamela Philips claimed the name was coined by fishermen who witnessed the turtles dying after being \"turned turtle\" (on their backs). The fishermen said the turtles \"died of a broken heart\".[7][8]
Kemp's ridley has a triangular-shaped head with a somewhat hooked beak with large crushing surfaces. The skull is similar to that of the olive ridley.[11] Unlike other sea turtles, the surface on the squamosal bone where the jaw opening muscles originate, faces to the side rather than to the back.[12]
In November 2021 a male was found alive on Talacre beach in North Wales. The turtle was taken to the Anglesey Sea Zoo for treatment, with the intent of eventual transportation back to the Gulf of Mexico.[19]
This is the only species that nests primarily during the day.[23]The nesting season for these turtles is April to August. They nest mostly (95%) on a 16-mile beach in the Mexican state of Tamaulipas and on Padre Island in the US state of Texas, and elsewhere on the Gulf Coast. They mate offshore. Gravid females land in groups on beaches in arribadas[13] or mass nesting. They prefer areas with dunes, or secondarily, swamps. The estimated number of nesting females in 1947 was 89,000, but shrank to an estimated 7,702 by 1985.[24] Females nest one to four times during a season, keeping 10 to 20 days between nestings.[25] Incubation takes 6-8 weeks.[25] Around 100 eggs are in a clutch.[25] The hatchlings' sex is decided by the temperature in the area during incubation. If the temperature is below 29.5 C, the offspring will be mainly male.[25]
Efforts to protect L. kempii began in 1966, when Mexico's Instituto Nacional de Investigaciones Biologico-Pesqueras (National Institute of Biological-Fisheries Research) sent biologists Hunberto Chávez, Martin Contreras, and Eduardo Hernondez to the coast of southern Tamaulipas, to survey and instigate conservation plans.[26] Kemp's ridley turtle was first listed under the Endangered Species Conservation Act of 1970[27] on December 2, 1970, and subsequently under the Endangered Species Act of 1973. In 1977, an informal, binational, multiagency, the Kemp's Ridley Working Group, first met to develop a recovery plan.[26] A binational recovery plan was developed in 1984, and revised in 1992. A draft public review draft of the second revision was published by National Marine Fisheries Service in March 2010.[28] This revision includes an updated threat assessment.[29]
One mechanism used to protect turtles from fishing nets is the turtle excluder device (TED). Because the biggest danger to the population of Kemp's ridley sea turtles is shrimp trawls, the TED is attached to the shrimp trawl. It is a grid of bars with an opening at the top or bottom, fitted into the neck of the shrimp trawl. It allows small animals to slip through the bars and be caught while larger animals, such as sea turtles, strike the bars and are ejected, thus avoiding possible drowning.
In September 2007, Corpus Christi, Texas, wildlife officials found a record of 128 Kemp's ridley sea turtle nests on Texas beaches, including 81 on North Padre Island (Padre Island National Seashore) and four on Mustang Island. The figure was exceeded in each of the following 7 years (see graph to 2013, provisional figures for 2014 as at July, 118.[30]). Wildlife officials released 10,594 Kemp's ridley hatchlings along the Texas coast that year. The turtles are popular in Mexico, as raw material for leather and as food.[31]
In July 2020, five rehabilitated turtles were released back in to Cape Cod with satellite tracking devices to monitor their wellbeing.[32] A 2020 rescue mission to save 30 turtles from the freezing seas of Cape Cod was delayed by weather and technical issues, spurring a temporary rescue mission en route between Massachusetts and New Mexico. The Tennessee Aquarium offered overnight shelter and care, and the turtles were eventually released to the sea.[33]
Since April 30, 2010, 10 days after the accident on the Deepwater Horizon, 156 sea turtle deaths were recorded; most were Kemp's ridleys.[citation needed] Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries biologists and enforcement agents rescued Kemp's ridleys in Grand Isle.[34][citation needed] Most of the 456 oiled turtles that were rescued, cleaned, and released by the US Fish and Wildlife Service were Kemp's ridleys.[35]
The overall plan was to collect eggs from about 700 sea turtle nests, incubate them, and release the young on beaches across Alabama and Florida over a period of months.[37][38] Eventually, 278 nests were collected, including only a few Kemp's ridley nests.[39]
Henry Nicholas Ridley (1855-1956) was a botanist who worked primarily in southeastern Asia. His earliest paper in 1879 dealt with copepods. He also published several short titles on Asian herpetofauna, the first being on Malaysian reptiles (Ridley, 1899). Gotch said that H. N. Ridley had been in Brazil and also on the island of Fernando de Noronha off the northern coast of Brazil in 1887. He authored a single paper on the botany of Fernando de Noronha (Ridley, 1890a), as well as a paper (Ridley, 1888) and a book (Ridley, 1890b) on the natural history of this island. Scarcely any mention is made of turtles, and no mention of Ridley's name being used for them. Branner (1888) visited Fernando de Noronha in l886 but reported no sea turtles. Pritchard and Trebbau (1984) indicate no records of Lepidochelys (which would be L. olivacea) for Fernando de Noronha, but the species does nest in at least two places farther south in Brazil, as well as from the Guianas westward (Pritchard and Trebbau, 1984).
In his book about the Caribbean, Carr (1955) told of a ridley being caught 18 years earlier when he was out with Jonah Thompson in the Florida Keys. Thus, if we assume that Carr's book was being written in perhaps 1953, did he mean 1935 In any case he was saying l937 or earlier. Thompson's age was 65 and he said he'd started early. This suggests that the term ridley antedates perhaps 1900, and that gets close to Ridley's 1888-90 writings. Carr (1955) also indicated that an \"old pod\" at St. Lucie Inlet (peninsular Florida) said, \"This yer ridley don't raise. He's a bastard, a crossbreed you get when a loggerhead mounts a green...\" An old fisherman would not likely change his vernacular usage. Considering that both herpetologists and turtle fishermen were so puzzled by the identity of Lepidochelys kempii, I made a fanciful guess that the fishermen considered the identity to be a riddle, which was corrupted to ridley! Note that someone not familiar with pronunciation of a written word could have interpreted riddle as \"ridd le\".
Carr stated that he had visited all around the Caribbean and found no sign of ridleys or anyone who knew them. Thus the name ridley appears to be of limited geographic use. But in my conversations with Marjorie Carr, Archie Carr's widow, came a revelation. She could not remember the exact source, but she said that \"ridley\" came from \"riddle\", which was transmogrified in the Florida Keys to \"riddler\" and finally \"ridley\". The riddle being, she said, \"Who were its parents\" No one knew from whence the \"bastard turtle\", as local turtlers sometimes called it, came or where it bred. Mrs. Carr said that many of the variant names were long in use in the Keys. We could guess, then, that the name could well go back into the early 19th century, perhaps even earlier. If the name was to honor H. N. Ridley, we must wonder how it ever got to be seemingly only a Florida-Bahamas vernacular.
At the University of Florida's P. K. Yonge Library of Florida History, I perused a number of books dealing with Florida and the Florida Keys and I read old Key West newspapers dating from l831 onward into the early 1900's. Nowhere did I find the name \"ridley\", but the other sea turtles - green, hawksbill, loggerhead, and trunk (=leatherback) - were mentioned on occasion. Likewise, a search of literature on the Bahamas Islands turned up nothing. The most complete early listing on Florida sea turtles appeared in excerpts from John J. Audubon's early writings in 1831-32 (Herrick, 1926), in which he said of the sea turtles that four kinds occurred in the Florida Keys-the green, loggerhead, hawksbill, and trunk.
I have queried several herpetologists who work with turtles and especially sea turtles. None has any idea of the etymology of \"ridley\". The evidence is strong that \"ridley\" is a vernacular of local usage in Florida. Dr. Peter Pritchard (pers. comm.) says that he has never encountered the name \"olive ridley\" or \"Pacific ridley\" among native peoples in the range of Lepidochelys olivacea, but that local herpetologists may use it. Likewise Dr. Jack Frazier (pers. comm.) has not encountered the name ridley as a vernacular in the Pacific Ocean where virtually all literature used olive loggerhead for L. olivaceaas opposed to red-brown loggerhead applied to Caretta caretta. Perhaps one day the name \"ridley\" will surface in some obscure writing such as a whaling account or other early publication and provide a chronological clue to this mystery. 781b155fdc