TEDs

Your may think of a TED as a conference where geeks gather to get excited about innovations. But on the Gulf coast, a TED is a Turtle Exclusion Device. You put it in your shrimp net and it gives sea turtles an escape hatch. Otherwise they get tangled up and drown.

 

I spent an entire terrific morning listening to experts explain pretty much everything there is to know about sea turtles and exploring NOAA’s turtle-raising facility. There aren’t that many sea turtles in Texas waters, but Kemp's ridley sea turtles sometimes lay eggs on Padre Island, near the Mexican border. There’s an awful lot I don’t know, but here are a few random bits to pursue at leisure if you’re so inclined:

 

There are five kinds of Gulf turtles, ranging from the little, endangered Kemp’s, about two feet long, to the loggerheads that can be more like six feet. The loggerheads, in particular, have an awe-inspiring life story: their life story takes them up the East Coast, across the Atlantic to Europe, and down to the Azores. Eventually they come back to their home beach to breed.

 

 

If sea turtle eggs are laid on a warm beach, females will result; if it’s cooler, they’ll be males. Doesn’t that give rise to all kinds of interesting questions and speculations??

The beaches in Galveston have signs reminding people to leave turtles alone, not to litter, and to dispose of any fishing line in the receptacles that are places on all the beaches. Turtles eat pretty much anything, and plastic supermarket bags can look a lot like jellyfish. And they have to breathe air, so if they get tangled up in fishing line, or get it wrapped around their throats, their lives are in grave danger.

But commercial fishing is probably the biggest threat; hence the TEDs. The NOAA people raise hundreds of turtles at their research facility here in Galveston, to use as guinea pigs in testing new TED designs.

 

They’re incredibly careful in how they raise them and do the testing, and release the turtles equally carefully when they’re finished. These bright and thoughtful people also get schools involved in awareness campaigns and hold these annual orientation sessions for the public, just before breeding season.

 

But no one could tell me how the Kemp’s ridley got its name. Kemp was the fisherman who discovered it, but what's a ridley turtle? The phrase puts me in mind of a semi-palmated sandpiper, or a runcible spoon. But nobody seems to know.