Kemp's ridley turtle - Population & Distribution
Previous Population and Distribution
Above: a news item on the release of Kemp's ridleys in Texas, which includes brief footage of the 1947 arribada.
Given that there may well have been 2 to 3 times this number of females that did not lay that afternoon, and perhaps an equal number of males far offshore, it can be estimated that the population 50 years ago numbered a few hundred thousand.
(A glimpse of this film can be seen in the video opposite.)
There was massive exploitation of eggs until this species received protection in 1965.
In 1985, there were just 702 nests found on the Tamaulipas coastline, from approximately 300 adult females.
Current Population and Distribution
Nowadays single-day arrivals are numbered in the hundreds. This is the result of an enormous conservation effort since 1966 that included protection of all nests produced at Rancho Nuevo, the captive raising and subsequent release of juveniles to avoid the high mortality as hatchlings, and the required use of Turtle Excluder Devices (TEDs) in the Gulf of Mexico to reduce capture in fishing nets.
Juveniles Kemp's ridleys have been observed in bays and estuaries in Louisiana and neighbouring states both in US and Mexico, while specimens have also been reported off the coast of Massachusetts. Kemp's ridleys main nesting colony is in Rancho Nuevo, state of Tamaulipas, Mexico.
Apart from this 20 km beach in the Gulf of Mexico where some 8,000 nests were laid in the nesting season of 2007, a small number of females regularly nest at other beaches in the Mexican states of Tamaulipas and Veracruz, as well as along the coast of Texas in the U.S.. Sporadic nesting also occurs in the Mexican state of Campeche. Since 1987, numbers have been rising to a total of 3,845 nests recorded in the 1998 season, and in the order of 11,000 nests recorded in 2007 in the state of Tamaulipas alone.
