ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Friday, July 5, 1996 TAG: 9607050097
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B-4 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: GLOUCESTER POINT
SOURCE: Knight-Ridder/Tribune
She doesn't have a name, but Kemp's ridley turtle No. PPX858 will probably go down in sea turtle history.
She got her number in 1989, after she was found by a waterman in the Potomac River. Kemp's ridley turtles are the rarest sea turtles on Earth, and scientists at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science put tags on her flippers to help keep track of her.
This spring, after seven years, she turned up on a beach in Mexico, a six-mile stretch of sand where she - and every other Kemp's ridley turtle - was born.
That makes her the first known Kemp's ridley from this side of Miami to return to the turtles' nesting grounds. The discovery invalidates a long-held belief about ridley turtles, said VIMS scientist Jack Musick.
``It's terrific,'' Musick said. ``Scientifically, it's very significant.''
The theory was that any Kemp's ridley turtle that ended up in the Atlantic would never return to Rancho Nuevo, that Mexican beach some 100 miles south of Brownsville, Texas. Swept by currents around the tip of Florida as infants, the turtles were considered lost forever from the general population in the Gulf of Mexico. But the turtles did survive in the Atlantic. Scientists knew they migrated up and down the coast, as far north as Cape Cod Bay in the summer, then back to Florida as water temperatures dropped. Finding ridleys in the Chesapeake Bay in the summer is not unusual.
That is one reason why Musick believed that the conventional wisdom about Atlantic ridleys was wrong. There were just too many over here to think they couldn't make it back.
Now Turtle No. PPX858 has proved him right.
``I was elated,'' Musick said.
VIMS scientists have tagged about 100 ridley turtles in the bay since 1979. Most were juveniles, 3 to 5 years old. Ridleys don't begin reproducing until 10 or 12, the age when females begin returning to Rancho Nuevo.
When she was tagged in 1989, No. PPX858 was 20 inches long; last month, when she deposited 116 eggs in a nest on the beach, she was more than 27 inches long.
In the 1940s, as many as 42,000 female ridleys would nest on that stretch of beach in a single day. Today, about 1,500 females will nest in the entire season, Musick said.
Biologists and Mexican soldiers patrol the beach during the spring nesting season, protecting the eggs from predators, both human and animal. The turtles have also been helped by regulations that require American shrimp boats to use special nets that let the turtles escape.
The turtles are protected in the Chesapeake as well, just like any other endangered species. The discovery of No. PPX858 in Mexico this spring means those protections are meaningful, Musick said.
LENGTH: Medium: 58 linesby CNB