Elizabeth Waters
Murphy
3/9/11
Literature Review
Introduction:
There are so many amazing animals in the world like tree frogs, whales, sea turtles, and
pandas. However, these animals may be all gone before long because many of these are
endangered species. They are dying because of natural things and because of humans. I decided
to research endangered species, namely sea turtles, because I love animals, especially the ones
listed above, and don’t want to become extinct any time soon. I want to find out why these
beautiful creatures are slowly dying out and if there is any effort going out to save them and to
get them off the endangered list. Hopefully there are a lot of people in the US and the world that
are trying to protect our wildlife, so that our children can see all the amazing animals that are
here today. I will be looking at articles about endangered species and articles about sea turtles,
which are endangered, to learn more.
"Endangered Species and Wildlife Conservation." Global Issues in Context Online
Collection. Detroit: Gale, 2011. Global Issues In Context. Web. 9 Mar. 2011.
The definition of an “endangered species is any species of animal or plant whose population has
declined to the point where survival of the species is in peril.” There are many threats to
endangered species, both natural and human causes. Natural causes would include disease,
natural climate, habitat competition, and disasters. Most endangered species are in a limited or
small habitats, so these major causes could suddenly kill the species. The Monarch butterflies are
becoming endangered because of extreme weather because the violet storms in Mexico and then
when they are in Texas, there is a heat wave, so the butterflies don’t lay as many eggs. Extinction
and endangered species is a natural process for the Earth, because fossils show that “only 2 to 4
percent of the species that have existed on Earth remain in existence today.” Most of this
extinction was due to the asteroid that hit the Earth.
Nowadays, it is not just the natural causes that cause extinction, “human activities have
greatly increased the rate at which species become extinct.” Some of the human causes are
killing species faster than they can reproduce, take the species’ habitat for human uses, introduce
species to new diseases or predators, damaging the ecology, and global climate change. An
example is the marine life in the Gulf of Mexico, like the blue-fin tuna, turtle, and pelicans, are
dying because of the oil spill. The oil sticks to their feathers so they can’t fly, or they ingest it
and some many of the animals died from that disaster. Also, there is poaching of animals because
of their fur or meat, like tigers and sharks. These species are important to humans because they
could be medical plants or have a critical role in their ecosystem and health of humans, like pest
control, produces oxygen, cleanses pollution.
Even though humans have increased nature’s extinction rates by 100 to 1000 times, they
are doing things to help. Humans use diplomatic efforts to help the situation. The Bonn
Convention and other conventions try and regulate human activities, like habitat destruction and
hunting. There is scientific advance, too, like DNA sequencing barcode for selling wildlife meat,
which will help inform laws that protect wildlife from being traded. Many of the efforts to
protect endangered species were successful.
Hyder, Joseph. "Endangered Species Laws." U*X*L Encyclopedia of Water Science. Ed. K.
Lerner, Brenda Lerner, and Lawrence Baker. Vol. 3. Detroit: U*X*L, 2005. 471476. Global Issues In Context. Web. 3 Mar. 2011.
“A species (group of like organisms that can reproduce) is listed as endangered if it is in
immediate danger of extinction throughout all or a significant part of its habitat.” There are about
400 animals and 600 plants in just the US that are endangered. Species can become extinct
naturally, but because of the rapid growth of the human population, it is now a majority human’s
fault. With more and more people, more habitats of animals are being taken over or destructed
because for farming and housing. This leaves species without a home or food. There is also
hunting and pollution that is killing the species that live near humans. For marine species,
pollution affects them more because it changes their habitat. There is also commercial and
whaling that affect the species being catch and other marines that get captured by the nets.
There has many different laws passed to help endangered species. The Endangered
Species Protection Act of 1966 was major because it showed that humans need to act to prevent
the extinction of species, but it didn’t help much. Then, there was the Marine Mammal
Protection Act of 1972, stopped hunting, capturing, and killing of marine mammals to protect
their populations and the government does enforce it. Nixon signed the Endangered Species Act
of 1973, which protects any species that is threatened or endangered to preserve and hopefully let
them recover. This act prevents hunters, fishers, and homeowners from harming the species due
to recovery plans. Last is the CITES, which supervises plant and animal trades so that the trades
do not decrease the species population too fast. This has been successfully protecting species.
Possardt, Earl. "Sea turtles bring people and nations together." Endangered Species
Bulletin Spring 2010: 8. General OneFile. Web. 9 Mar. 2011.
There is a total of seven different species of sea turtles. There use to be abundant amount of them
until humans fished in the sea. Now, all of the species are endangered or threatened in the
Endangered Species Act. Major threats to the leatherback sea turtle are all because of human
interfere. They are taking and using of eggs and nesting female, gillnets (snares fish in nets), drift
nets (gillnets that drift with the current), and longline fisheries. All the nets, the sea turtles get
catch in and drown. For loggerhead turtles, they are mainly killed because of illegal harvest of
nesting females for their meat. The other sea turtles have similar threats.
However, in Mexico and US, there is a 30-year convention set up and is working at
increasing Kemp’s ridley turtles. A similar conservation effort is happening in the Caribbean and
helping the hawksbill nesting population increase. There are many groups and laws that are
helping to conserve the turtles like the Marine Turtle Conservation Act of 2004, The Marine
Turtle Conservation Fund (provides grants to countries that help), and a major one, Wildlife
Without Borders Marine Turtle Conservation Fund (WWB-MTCF). The WWB-MTCF is trying
to make a difference by protecting the nesting to ensure “that some populations will survive to
test their adaptive capacity,” raising world awareness of the threats, and helping build
conservations.
Mooallem, Jon. "Turtle People." The New York Times Magazine 3 Oct. 2010: 42(L). Global
Issues In Context. Web. 9 Mar. 2011.
Loggerhead nest on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico (Alabama and Florida panhandle)
and starts in May. However, there was the oil spill in the Gulf, so the baby sea turtles would be
heading straight to the oil. Wildlife agencies came up with a plan to safe the baby sea turtles.
“Sea-turtle eggs … would be dug up during their very last days of incubation, packed into
Styrofoam coolers and shipped to a climate-controlled warehouse at the Kennedy Space Center
on the opposite coast of Florida.” Then the baby turtles would swim out in the oil-free Atlantic.
Since this plan in response to human-cause disaster would take a lot of work and people, there
was many volunteers that helped out in this sea turtle event. There is five different species of sea
turtles that nest on US beaches. There are volunteers that help barricade the nests to protect them.
There is an volunteer organization in Alabama, Share the Beaches, that walk the beaches in the
morning of nesting season to look for the nests to protect them. These volunteer efforts to
conserve the sea turtles started in the 1980s because people tried to protect nests with sandbags
from the coming hurricanes. Now the state government helps them and trains the volunteers.
Conclusion:
I have learned a lot about endangered species and sea turtles from reading these different
article. Before reading these articles, I didn’t know that sea turtle were really endangered and
how they were threatened other than natural predators. I have learned that all sea turtle species
are endangered or threatened. I learned it isn’t just nature taking a toll on sea turtles but, mainly
because humans killing them for their meat or while fishing with nets. Even though we are cause
of this problem (sea turtles), there is effort to help and conserve them. Like the Share the
Beaches group in Alabama and others in Florida, who protect the nests and eggs of the sea
turtles. I really want to know exactly how the organizations are conserving sea turtles other than
eggs and if there is any way to help out.