How many gopher tortoises are left on Egmont Key after Hurricane Helene's storm surge swept many away?
The Brief
Local experts estimate Hurricane Helene's storm surge carried 50 to 100 gopher tortoises from Egmont Key to Fort DeSoto.
Eckerd students are teaming up with the Egmont Key Alliance to see how many gopher tortoises are still on Egmont Key.
In the students' first several days, they've more gopher tortoises on Egmont than they expected.
EGMONT KEY, Fla. - In just their first several days studying gopher tortoises on Egmont Key, Eckerd College students already have found more than 40.
"Gopher tortoises are a really important keystone species, so a lot of other animals depend on them, and Egmont Key is a really unique, important site for gopher tortoises, not just in the Tampa Bay region, but really throughout the broader southeast," Jeff Goessling, Eckerd College Associate Professor Biology, explained.
The backstory
Goessling is leading an internship for the students. Eckerd is partnering with the Egmont Key Alliance, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, which is an internship program on campus and a local benefactor who supports conservation research in the area. The students are in the second week of a six-week study looking into the tortoises' normal population range.
"Our goal this year is to basically figure out how many tortoises are out here. That's relevant for long-term monitoring of this population and it also fits in with understanding impacts of the recent hurricanes that we had last year," Goessling said.
Local experts estimate Hurricane Helene's storm surge carried 50 to 100 gopher tortoises from Egmont Key to Fort DeSoto.
PREVIOUS:Hurricane Helene storm surge relocates dozens of Egmont Key tortoises to Fort De Soto
"When we were coming out to the island on Wednesday of last week, it was stormy and we were kind of reliving that of what that journey would be like is a 10 or 15-pound tortoise bobbing through the waves. So, I'm sure it was a pretty harrowing journey. I don't know if tortoises remember that kind of thing, but if they do, I'm sure it was memorable," Goessling said.
Experts are monitoring more than 80 tortoise burrows at Fort DeSoto. That's 10 times the number of burrows there before Hurricane Helene.
Dig deeper
At Egmont, the students measure the animals, weigh them and give them an identifying mark. None of it hurts the tortoises. If the animal is already marked, the identification tells them information like how old the tortoise is.
"We just want to see to it that we maintain that long-term continuity, so that when we have acute problems, like a hurricane or like other potential environmental threats, we have the background data to really understand what's normal, what's a normal population range, what's the normal population growth rate," Goessling said. "Everything that happens isn't always bad. If all of a sudden something good happens, we want to be able to quantify that. Hey, if all of a sudden some change in habitat management is improving tortoises, we want know that as well," he said.
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The research, Goessling said, is just like the animal.
"Tortoises are classic a slow steady approach to their own life history and so, it takes that type of approach of kind of steady constancy to understand really long-term important questions again like how long they live, how many of them there are, what their normal kind of life history course is," he said.
By the numbers
Since researchers started studying gopher tortoises on Egmont Key in the early 1990s, they've identified 923. The students found some of the oldest ones in just the first several days. They say it's surprising, but welcome news.
What they're saying
"Honestly, it's kind of mind-boggling," Pixie Parker, a rising senior majoring in marine biology and a part of the internship, said. "We don't know how they survived events like that [the hurricanes], especially considering that this island was completely inundated. I know that they can survive some periods of anoxia, but we really don't how they survived, but clearly, they did," she said.
"It was really amazing because, like I said, we were not expecting much here and then it was really beautiful when we got on the island and three tortoises walked up to us. It was very beautiful and resilient, like, life finds a way," Tristan Joyce-Velez, a rising sophomore majoring in marine biology and part of the internship, said. "It's amazing to see nature, you know, persevering and thriving," he said.
"The hurricanes were so devastating for everyone who lived down here, so it was honestly just an amazing moment and encouraging, honestly," Joyce-Velez said.Goessling said gopher tortoises are extremely resilient, and the tortoises they found so far are in pretty good shape. Fifteen of the more the around 40 they had found as of Wednesday were already marked from previous researchers.
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"Tortoises are herbivores and the hurricane has created a lot of mess in some parts of the island, but then as that mess kind of ages and gets moved out of the way, there's a lot of vegetation coming up that the tortoises are eating," Goessling said.
Gopher tortoises, their eggs and their burrows are all protected by Florida law and it's illegal to disturb them. You can report a sighting to Florida Fish and Wildlife on its website.
The Source
This story was written with information gathered by FOX 13's Kailey Tracy.
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