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After roaring through the Caribbean earlier in the week, killing at least 11 people and destroying homes and property along its path, Hurricane Beryl came ashore on Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula early Friday as a Category 2 hurricane, weakening to a tropical storm as it moved over land.
Reuters reports that damage from the 70-mile-per-hour winds was relatively light, although power was knocked out in the resort town of Tulum, where the storm came ashore. Tulum is about 80 miles south of Cancún in the state of Quintana Roo; it was unclear at blogtime whether any local, state, or Mexican federal officials had fled the area prior to the storm to hang out at the Texas home of US Sen. Ted Cruz.
Beryl is now headed into the Gulf of Mexico, where warm water is expected to make it gain strength again, probably returning to hurricane strength before reaching land again Monday, most likely in southern Texas. Here’s the projected path from the National Weather Service on Friday:
Oh, yes, this is very much a climate change story; thanks to much warmer water than normal in the Atlantic, Beryl rapidly grew to a Category 5 hurricane, becoming the earliest Category 5 storm in history, with hurricane season just beginning. We should probably hurry up with that whole “transitioning away from fossil fuels” thing even more aggressively, just to keep things from getting far, far worse than they are now.
But now, the nice time that our headline hinted at: Earlier this week, well before Beryl arrived, Mexican officials organized an effort to give endangered caray sea turtle eggs a better chance at surviving the storm, carefully transferring eggs from some nests on Cancún beaches into sand-filled coolers and moving them to a safer location, and in other spots, building up “corrals” made of sand bags to protect the nests from storm surge.
Biologist Graciela Tiburcio, one of Mexico’s foremost sea turtle experts, said it was an extreme measure that might cause some excess failure to hatch among the turtle eggs.
“Look, it’s not the best thing to do, but we are facing an emergency in which if they don’t take them out, they all could be lost,” said Tiburcio, who was not involved in the effort.
The article points out that whenever possible, it’s best not to disturb turtle nests at all: The sand keeps the eggs at the right temperature to hatch, and (just another reminder of how fucking cool science is)
Moreover, sea turtles are believed to use the natural light on the beaches to orient themselves, and in many cases, return to the same spot themselves after they become adults.
But with a hurricane on the way, the risk was too great that the beaches would be flooded and the nests washed out to sea.
“In a normal situation this would not be right, because this will surely cause mortality,” said Tiburcio. “There will be a lower rate of hatched eggs, that is the reality. But it’s also a reality that if the nests are left there, they’ll all be lost.”
On Twitter, Cancún municipal officials wrote Wednesday that they had moved about 10,400 sea turtle eggs from 93 nests on Playa Delfines, a beach designated as a protected area. They posted photos of municipal workers placing the eggs in coolers, with the original nest sites marked with wooden posts. You can get a good look at the process, and the care with which the workers handled the eggs, in this Twitter video by Adriana Varillas:
Now some anti-abortion ghoul will say Libs are all about saving turtle fetuses, but … Ahh, fuck ‘em, this is a Nice Time post.
No telling if the markers, which aren’t very tall, survived the waves, but that Reuters report that major beaches were spared serious damage sounds encouraging. The AP notes that Cancún’s environmental department didn’t “immediately respond to requests for comment on where the turtle eggs were being taken for safekeeping.”
We’ll keep an eye out for updates on this story. Go, little turtles! And open thread!
[AP / Mexico News Daily / Reuters / AP / CNN]
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