Rare turtle stranded due to Donald Trump aid freeze
Rhossi, the Kemp's ridley turtle found washed up on Rhosneigr Beach in Wales in December 2023. At the time Anglesey Sea Zoo noted that "We are increasing Rhossi’s temperature very gradually and monitoring 24/7 round-the-clock every 1-2 hours during this period."
‘All politics is local’, declared Associated Press chief, Byron Price, in 1932. A recent Donald Trump directive is a prime example. It has created problems for a humble fellow-American.
A year ago, the North Wales Chronicle reported that Meg, a four year old dog, had made a curious discovery. Walking on Treath Llydan Beach in Anglesey, she sniffed out a juvenile sea-turtle hiding under seaweed. ‘Cold-stunned’ by the waters of the Irish Sea, and just about alive, the casualty was taken to Anglesey Sea Zoo for rehabilitation and tender loving care. Like Dingle Oceanworld in Ireland, the aquarium there has turtle A&E facilities.
Rhossi was nursed slowly back to health. A year on, it is fit and well, ready to return to the ocean. But it must be flown back to the warm US waters from whence it came. There are established procedures for doing this, but Trump has put a spanner in the works. He has shut down the American organisations which handle such rehabilitations. Stranded, Rhossi can’t be discharged and must remain, a bed-blocking exile, in Wales.
But this is no ordinary patient; it is a Kemp’s ridley. Kemp’s is the smallest of world’s 15 sea-turtle species and the most endangered.
Richard Moore Kemp was born in Green Turtle Cay, Bahamas, in 1925. The location’s name was auspicious — a turtle species would, one day, be named after him. A merchant and furniture dealer in Key West, Florida, he was also an amateur naturalist.
Among the turtles found off Florida, there were small ones known locally as ‘ridleys’. The origin of the name is obscure but it may be a corruption of ‘riddle’. Kemp was intrigued. With his naturalist’s hat on, he sent a specimen of the mysterious beast to Samuel Garman at Harvard. The zoologists there decided that it belonged to a species new to science. They named it Lepidochelys kempii. A related, slightly larger, species, the olive ridley trutle, lives in the Pacific.
Conservationists have long been worried about the future of the Kemp’s ridley. In , published in 1970, UCC zoology professor Fergus O’Rourke wrote that the Kemp’s "breeds irregularly in a remote spot along the Mexican coast and, if its nesting area were to be discovered, it could be extinct in two or three seasons". Surveys showed that the number of nests declined by more than 90% between 1947 and 1985.
Pregnant females haul out on beaches, mostly along the coast of the Gulf of Mexico. Then Trump’s ‘drill Baby drill’ slogan kicks in... an expectant mother digs holes, in each of which she lays about a hundred eggs. Emerging from the sand in due course, the little hatchlings run the gauntlet of predators lying in wait, wanting to devour them. The next few minutes will be, by far, the most dangerous of a turtle’s entire life. If it manages to reach the sea, the youngster swims to comparative safety.
Over the next year or so, it may drift northwards with the Gulf Stream. Some turtles eventually reach European, or Mediterranean, waters. Kemp’s is virtually an Irish vagrant species, recorded mainly between Spanish Point, in County Clare, and Donegal Bay.
Richard Kemp died in 1908. Turtle bass-reliefs adorned his tombstone.
