A sea turtle hatchling shortly after emerging from its nest. Federal wildlife officials are moving ahead with a plan to move up to 50,000 eggs off oil-ravaged beaches to the eastern coast of Florida, a plan officials acknowledge has risks. File / U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

By  Ryan Dezember, Press-Register
Published: Tuesday, June 29, 2010, 5:00 AM Federal wildlife officials plan to move tens of thousands of sea turtle eggs from oil-plagued beaches along the northern Gulf to Florida’s east coast, where the reptiles would hatch in a controlled environment and be released into the Atlantic Ocean. Made public over the weekend, the 10-page plan details the procedure for digging up as many as 50,000 ping-pong-ball-sized eggs from some 800 nests in Alabama and the Florida Panhandle, packing them into sand-filled Styrofoam coolers and transporting them via plane to a Florida facility. “This plan is painful to everyone,” said U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service spokeswoman Bonnie Strawser, who is stationed at the Bon Secour National Wildlife Refuge in Gulf Shores. “We don’t think it’s a perfect plan, but it’s better than losing 100 percent of them.” The plan’s authors with the Fish & Wildlife Service make clear in a companion document that they are pursuing the unprecedented relocation with trepidation. There are “definite, but unquantifiable risks” involved in handling the threatened and endangered species’ eggs and “mortality beyond natural levels must be expected,” but the current situation in the Gulf requires extraordinary and previously unthinkable measures, the Wildlife Service said. “In developing this plan we realized early that our expectations for success must be rooted in the knowledge that doing nothing would most likely result in the loss of most, if not all, of this year’s northern Gulf of Mexico hatchling cohort,” government scientists wrote. …

Wildlife officials to move thousands of sea turtle eggs to Florida’s east coast