The Gulf's Great Turtle Relocation Project

An anonymous reader writes "All along the Gulf Coast's beaches it's turtle-hatching season. Conservationists knew the poor hatchlings wouldn't have a chance if they swam out into the oily waters of the Gulf, so they came up with an incredibly ambitious plan: they would dig up 70,000 turtle eggs, carefully raise them in a climate-controlled hanger at the Kennedy Space Center, and release the hatchlings into the clean Atlantic waters off Florida's east coast. Now that project is well underway, and Discover Magazine has pictures of the first batch of hatchlings crawling toward the welcoming waves. But there's a chance all this do-gooding won't do any good. New Scientist found experts who argue that releasing them into the Atlantic rather than into the Gulf will screw up the turtles' navigation systems, which will prevent them from following their normal migratory routes."

Comments

Svetz - Fetch me a Turtle...

[NotQuiteReal]

All this reminds me of those old Larry Niven stories, where some time-traveling nave in the future goes back in time to get whatever animal is requested by the dim-witted ruler. Extinct, mythical, doesn't matter, in the future, they are all things that don't exist, and all the same.

Turtles? Never seen one. Exist, doesn't exist... all the same to me.

If they can't survive, they should have evolved better. Oil is a natural product. Do you want them to survive lava flows too?

Something else will succeed Homo Sapiens as the "dominant" species on this planet someday, and they probably won't worry about our demise. And so it goes.