Mojave’s ‘Gitmo’: How Marines are saving endangered turtles

Report from Marine Corps Base Twentynine Palms, California — As soon as the two small turtles sensed Brian Hennen’s footsteps, they came out of their burrows and asked for a handful of bok choy and snap peas, which they would soon throw away.

It will take several years for this playing card-sized turtle to develop a shell strong enough to ward off flying crows. So for now, they live in a protected habitat surrounded by barbed wire and covered with netting, along with about 1,000 other members of their species.

The Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center’s sophisticated equipment protects it from not only crows, coyotes, and other predators, but also rumbling tanks, live explosives, and anything else that could endanger the turtles within its 1,189-square-meter compound. Designed to protect turtles from objects. Miles Mojave Desert Base.

“Dessert tortoises are considered a keystone species, which means they have a disproportionate impact on the entire ecosystem,” said Hennen, a civilian who heads the conservation division of the base’s environmental affairs division.

Turtles pock the desert floor with holes that other animals use as shelter, and scatter seeds of native plants in their excrement. “They’re influencing other things that can be on the landscape,” Hennen said.

Some people refer to the barbed wire-enclosed area as Tortoise Gitmo, after the U.S. Navy’s Guantanamo Bay base and a Cuban prisoner of war camp. Others call it the “turtle store,” where young turtles are released before they are mature enough to breed.

Officially, the facility is called the Tortoise Research and Aquarium, and since its establishment in 2005, it has been used by scientists to learn how to protect species threatened by human encroachment, disease, and climate change. It has been helpful.

In the first iteration of the program, biologists collected eggs from wild females and raised the hatchlings until they were strong enough to withstand predators and drought. This is a process known as “head starting.”

The facility received an influx of new tenants in 2017 when the military relocated the turtles to make way for a controversial expansion of the base’s training range. Biologists decided to start early with about 550 young turtles collected from the expanded area.

Then, a few years ago, Hennen’s team began collecting eggs from relocated adult turtles, incubating them, hatching them, and studying whether they were breeding with their new neighbors. Rather than release the hatchlings into the wild, where they are unlikely to survive, they decided to give them a head start as well.

Brian Hennen of the base’s environmental affairs division holds a desert tortoise.

Some desert conservationists have been critical of this effort, arguing that captive breeding programs are essentially smokescreens that distract from the urgent need to protect critical habitat. .

“What I would like to see is this type of effort done on public lands as a means to repatriate communities rather than minimize the impact of Marine Corps expansion,” the nonprofit said. said Ed LaRue, Desert Tortoise Council Director. .

“Hundreds of square miles of good turtle habitat are now being used for military exercises,” LaRue said, citing base expansions at Twentynine Palms and Fort Irwin National Training Center near Barstow. ” “This allows the military to proceed with deforestation of the desert and claim success because the turtles have been moved out of the way.”

Instead, he said, the base should stop expanding into turtle habitat.

Hennen said the program has allowed biologists to engage in decades of monitoring to increase turtle populations and track their success.

He also noted that the Marine Corps Air-Ground Combat Center is partnering with a coalition of government agencies and non-governmental organizations to conserve off-base land. And within the boundaries of the massive facility, officials have identified the most valuable turtle habitat and set aside 43,800 acres of exclusion zones to protect turtles and other natural and cultural resources, he said. say.

Twentynine Palms Marines receive specialized training in how to handle turtles. All it takes is a glimpse of a single reptilian intruder and the training is called off. Units must contact range control by radio and request permission to remove the animal. Permission is granted, but if the turtle urinates and can become dangerously dehydrated, the soldiers must call it back in and wait for an answer from the base’s ecologist.

Desert tortoises were once so abundant that people driving through the Mojave River brought them home as backyard pets. But in some areas of the California desert, their numbers have declined by up to 96 percent since the 1970s, according to research plots monitored by Christine Berry, a supervisory research wildlife biologist at the U.S. Geological Survey’s Western Ecological Research Center.

Recognizing the dire situation, the California Fish and Game Commission voted in April to remove the desert tortoise from its endangered species status.

Marines aren’t the only threat to turtles. Roads and highways have fragmented previously wide-open desert areas into patches that are sometimes too small to allow for the breeding and genetic diversity needed to maintain population health. did. Climate warming is depleting some regions of the rainfall needed to sustain them.

Non-desert livestock grazed and trampled the turtles’ favorite plants, spreading unpalatable non-native grasses in their wake. Power lines have added miles of perches for crows, making it easier to spot young turtles.

Ken Nagy, a professor emeritus at the University of California, Los Angeles, who co-founded the program at Twentynine Palms with Hennen, said crows were once rare in the desert, living for only a few months in the spring of wet years. It is said that there was not. But now, thanks to everything from leaky gas station faucets to irrigation in alfalfa fields, birds now have year-round access to drinking water, and their populations have increased by 30 to 50 times what they once were. The number has doubled, he said.

“If you go under the crow’s nest on the telephone pole, you will see piles of dead hatchlings. They were opened, killed, carried to the nest by the adults, and fed to the hatchlings.” he said. “That’s how it all started.”

The Tortoise Research and Captive Facility houses vulnerable turtles on a vast Marine Corps base.

In the desert tortoise early start program, biologists use radio transmitters to monitor females in the wild and portable X-ray machines to determine when females are pregnant. They take those females into an enclosure to lay eggs and then release them. Newly hatched chicks are raised in captivity until they reach a certain length. Twentynine Palms has a standard of 110 millimeters, or about 4 inches long, which takes seven to nine years. They are then re-released, usually using radio transmitters to monitor their health and movement.

The concept was pioneered at Fort Irwin in the 1990s, followed by a similar program at Edwards Air Force Base near Mojave.

The captive breeding area is tucked away in an isolated corner of the base down a sandy road surrounded by mesquite dunes and wrinkled mountains. A past collection of roughly constructed quarter-like buildings used for training. The fence used to keep the Marines on the road has sharp pins on top of each post to prevent crows from perching elsewhere.

Brian Hennen studies desert tortoises at the turtle research and breeding facility at Twentynine Palms Marine Corps Base.

Inside the facility, the sound of clanging echoes from the enclosure. This is a particularly feisty turtle nicknamed Typhoid Mary, so-called because it carries a contagious bacteria that causes upper respiratory illness.

She heard the biologist coming and wants a snack. She slammed her shell against the metal partition to get their attention. When Hennen hands her the kale, her beak turns green.

Mary is believed to be at least 30 years old. She is one of the few adults at the facility, and as a result of the 2017 base expansion, the military used helicopters to transport more than 1,000 turtles to other areas, most of them off-base. I ended up here. Scientists are currently monitoring about 125 of these adults and 50 adolescents using radio telemetry to monitor their health and movements.

Vulnerable turtles are kept in captivity on a vast Marine Corps base.

However, Mary was found to have mycoplasma and was placed on the no-fly list. Upper respiratory tract disease also contributes to turtle declines in populations that are typically close to human communities. Scientists believe the infection may have spread by people releasing sick pet turtles into the wild, Hennen said.

Despite her illness, Mary remains relatively healthy as she receives adequate nutrition and fluids. Still, she’ll probably spend her days here trying not to infect others.

This program and others like it have been winning converts over the years.

Biologist Tim Shields, who founded a company developing turtle conservation technology, previously opposed starting at the top, believing it was unnatural and would reduce the turtles’ ability to survive.

“But some very smart people have spent a lot of time figuring out how to essentially mass-produce turtles, and I’m all for that,” he says. “Because the underlying ecosystem is so disrupted that there are no alternatives.”