Gulf Turtle Egg Relocation Judged a Success

Finally some good news to report following the Deepwater Horizon summer. A massive effort to rescue thousands of turtle eggs appears to have worked. The United States Fish and Wildlife Service is 14,676 hatchlings -- mostly loggerheads - from the roughly 25,000 sea turtles eggs that it moved to Florida's east coast from northern beaches.

With a hatching success rate over 50%, biologists have a lot to be happy about. Still, there remain concerns whether the egg transfer will impact the turtles later on in life. In particular, they still don't know which beaches the turtles will return to. As a report in Live Science noted, there's uncertainty about whether the relocation disrupted the process of imprinting, which allows female turtles to set up nests on the beach where they hatched. "Some think that imprinting occurs in the egg, others that it occurs as newly hatched turtles crawl towards the sea, and some believe that it may be a combination of the two. So it is unknown to which beaches turtles incubated primarily on northen Gulf beaches then released from beaches on the Atlantic Ocean will return."