MTN 105:11 LETTER TO THE EDITOR: T E D s

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LETTER TO THE EDITOR: T E D s

C. R. Shoop & C. Ruckdeschel
P.O. Box 796, St. Marys, GA 31558, USA (E-mail: cimuseum@yahoo.com)

It has been 12 years since the turtle excluder device (TED) regulations were implemented in the USA, but the stranding rate for dead sea turtles has continued to rise. The 17 mile beach of Cumberland Island, Georgia, has gone from an annual average stranding rate of 50 turtles during 1981 to 1985, to 84 dead turtles a year for the last five years. In each of the last two years, the toll has been more than 100. The increase in number of strandings has been irregular; nevertheless, the data alone give no indication when TED use was required. Some people dismiss the increased mortality, saying there are just more turtles, but that ignores the problem. That thousands of sea turtles continue to be killed by shallow water trawling is proof that the TED experiment is a failure, despite models and claims to the contrary, few of which incorporate stranding data. Each year or so, TED regulations are modified which allows another year of trawling (another experiment), yet the death toll continues to rise. The latest modification (2003) enlarged the TED opening to allow large turtles to escape, but most turtles that are killed are small. Less than 10% of the stranded turtles we have recorded were adults, and we have necropsied almost 2000 on Cumberland Island.

Shallow water trawling is akin to bull-dozing woodlands for blueberries. The destruction is enormous, the result long lasting, and the ultimate fate of the fishery is obvious. Areas off-limits to trawling are needed to protect habitats utilized by sea turtles and the ecosystem in general. Research on additional methods to keep turtles out of nets and deal with bycatch in a different way should be a priority. Our continued commercial exploitation as hunter-gathers must eventually end as it did with the bison and passenger pigeon. We are “clearcutting” and ravaging the nearshore ecosystems, with sea turtles one of the most obvious victims.

At present, the only local (GA) shrimp fishery nonlethal to sea turtles and essentially free of bycatch is the cast net fishery. However, the trawl fishery is politically strong enough to indirectly prohibit cast netters from modifying their nets to increase efficiency and to restrict their take to 48 quarts of shrimp per day in Georgia, USA. People using their own muscle are restricted in the amount of shrimp they are allowed, while powerful, destructive trawlers pulling up to four giant nets have no limits. There is something wrong with this picture.

Sea turtles are protected by the Endangered Species Act, so some pretense of governmental protection must be offered for trawling to continue. TED regulations provide that pretense and thereby enable shallow water trawling; the carnage of sea turtles continues. T-E-D really stands for “Trawling Enabling Device”.

We have entrusted the protection of all sea turtles in the waters of the USA to the National Marine Fisheries Service (NOAA, Department of Commerce), but we must remember that such obligation comes secondarily to their primary charge, promoting commercial fisheries, and thus presents a serious conflict of interest. The present government-sanctioned killing of our sea turtles is preventable, but the government is unwilling to make the politically charged decisions necessary. To do so would impinge upon or hinder the economically powerful shrimp trawling industry.

Government agencies continue to tout the value and great success of TED regulations and that pacifies the public. Perhaps if the public knew the truth, their outrage might outweigh the economic pressure now governing the situation. Are many thousands of dead sea turtles each year a measure of success? The public has an excuse, but why does the community of sea turtle biologists continue to support TEDs and accept the magnitude of mortality? The stranding results over the 12 year “experiment” should be obvious enough to convince anyone that the solution for adequately protecting sea turtles from trawl nets is not the current TED regulations.