Federal officials say 3,136 sea turtles stranded themselves along the nation's Gulf and Atlantic shores in 2000, a 10-year high and a 32 percent jump over an average year. Hundreds of sea turtles that ended up on beaches from Cape Cod to Panama City were part of mass strandings prompted by cold weather and water, according to Redlow. Still, he told the Sarasota Herald-Tribune for Sunday's editions, those incidents alone do not account for the sharp rise in the number of turtles washing ashore last year. A host of human activities including dredging operations, power plants and boaters, cause perhaps a quarter of the strandings. And turtles can get hurt getting tangled up in recreational fishing lines, nets or commercial longlines.
Nobody is certain what is going on.
Other theories blame unidentified disease, poisoning by a microorganism or pollutant, or turtles eating poisonous jellyfish that make it to Florida waters in the ballast water of ships. Others speculate a healthier sea turtle population has outgrown openings in metal cages used to expel turtles from shrimp nets, causing the larger turtles to suffer severe trauma trying to squeeze through the cages. It seems to be a number of different things. Hopefully, we'll figure out what is going on soon.