A no-commercial fishing zone extending to 20 fathoms or 17 nautical miles would protect an area where most Kemp's ridley movements occur, according to the report. The nesting season has just begun and we have already lost five Kemp's ridleys of breeding age. Every breeder we lose means fewer sea turtles in the future. A total of 396 sea turtles, including 132 Kemp's ridleys of all ages, stranded in Texas last year, the fourth highest total since the stranding network was founded in 1980. Strandings dropped and nesting activity increased during the Texas shrimping closure.
Scientific data shows a close correlation between shrimping and strandings.
At the Kemp's ridley primary nesting beach in Rancho Nuevo, Mexico, where 2,409 nests were laid last year, only six dead adult Kemp's ridleys washed up dead during the 1998 breeding and nesting season. The ratio of strandings to nestings was about 600 times higher in Texas than in Mexico last year. At Rancho Nuevo nearshore waters are closed to shrimp trawling during the entire nesting season. During all of 1998, an estimated 1,600 Kemp's turtles nested in the entire world, down from 40,000 Kemp's known to nest in a single day in 1947. A growing number of these turtles nest in a single place in the U.S. and that place is Padre Island, Texas.