Sea Turtles (summary/response 1)

In Velasquez-Manoff’s (2007) article entitled “Climate turns up heat on sea turtles”, he tried to explain that global warming and the change of climate have a bad effect on the turtle’s eggs. If it’s too hot, only females are born and the species could disappear. Out of seven species of sea turtles, six are endangered because of this change of climate.

First, this change of climate disturbs scientists, because they thought that if sea turtle’s births are affected, their habitat will be too. And they notice, in a warming world, an increasing of the sandy beaches due to stronger storms; these affect their habitat and make a shift of turtle’s food. So now to survive they need to change their area, to find a new habitat without heat and for their food. Velaquez-Manoff said that “there’s global warming’s most direct effect, more heat,” which means that if turtles affect everything, what they need must survive too, and also the other species that they depend on for food.

Secondly, after all these problems seen before for the adult turtles, now we will see about their births, and all the problems of climate change. In addition eggs of turtles need a specific temperature to produce not only female, which is 29.4 degrees (85 degree F.) to have mostly male, above it's mostly female, and with these change of climate, the temperature increase (2 degree more), that will produce only females. James Spotila said that the production of male before was every five or ten years, and it’s important to have more females than males. But with this increase of temperature, a male-producing year will come only every twenty years; with this the turtle can become extinct. In some beaches like Playa Grande on Costa Rica’s Pacific, it’s too hot for eggs, so they move them to a nursery to produce some males (because 70 or 90 are female) and when the young turtles emerge, they bring them to the beach and protect them from different predators like human or animals.

After that other scientists suggested to change the area of the turtles, and during nesting season to put the female turtles at different areas, different beaches, to disperse their eggs, to increase the chances of some eggs to hatch. But for me, all of these suggestions are impossible because human contact can affect the birth of turtles too. And this demands too much interference of human; I agree with protecting some eggs, and putting a few of them in a nursery, because this has a good effect on the species of sea turtles.

To conclude, we need to do everything possible to protect this species, because we can’t know what will happen if the sea turtles disappear, knowing that this species lived since dinosaurs (200 million years), or know what is lost if such an ancient and mysterious creature disappears as Velaquez-Manoff said. And turtles feed will proliferate, and have a bad effect on the oceans. So global warming is a very bad situation, and we need to do something not only for our future children but for all of humanity; it all depends on us.

Reference

Velaquez-Manoff, M. (2007, June 21). Climate turns up heat on sea turtles. The Christian Science Monitor. Retrieved October 23, 2007
from http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0621/p25s03-sten.htm