DAYTONA BEACH -- After some very rough decades in Florida, the gopher tortoise may get a well-deserved break.
On June 7 the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission will decide whether to uplist the tortoise from a "species of special concern" to "threatened," a category that represents a higher extinction risk.
(At the same meeting, the commission will also address the more controversial question of whether to downlist the Florida manatee from "endangered" to "threatened.")
Uplisting the tortoise is long overdue, say scientists, wildlife officials, and even some developers. The state projects that the gopher tortoise population -- estimated at between 1.2 and 2 million -- has dropped by more than half in the past 60 years, and will continue to drop as Florida's human population grows.
In the past 15 years, developers and contractors have legally buried some 74,000 tortoises alive, paying the state fees to buy gopher habitat elsewhere. And they've legally relocated 67,000 of the animals -- many to lands on which they cannot possibly survive. Untold thousands more have been buried or moved without the state's knowledge, or eaten illegally by Florida's die-hard culinary traditionalists.
Environmentalists and some state scientists have long decried the gopher tortoise rules as lax, and a "threatened" listing would not change them for at least a year, until a formal management plan is approved by the commission. But that plan is already being worked out, and seems to promise that the days of willy-nilly tortoise relocation, and bulldozing of burrows, are numbered.
The latter practice has received much attention recently from national animal-rights groups and regular folks who wince at the thought of tortoises slowly starving to death under a layer of asphalt. Developers, too, "are increasingly eager to avoid the bad publicity," said Joan Berish, the state's top gopher tortoise scientist.
And when the state solicited comment from scientists and the public last year on whether to uplist the tortoises, the response was a unanimous, unambiguous "yes" -- except for one representative of the Florida Home Builders Association, who thought the issue needed more research.
But protecting the gopher tortoise is a lot more complicated than merely calling it threatened and banning live burials. It will mean crucial decisions about where state and developers' money goes.
Currently, developers who destroy tortoises can pay into habitat "banks" elsewhere. But that habitat is small compared to the acreage destroyed, and in some cases open to future development.
Preston Robertson, a vice president of the Florida Wildlife Federation in Tallahassee, said that though "no one who cares about the tortoises is happy with entombing them," his organization is concerned more with habitat. Gopher tortoise burrows, which can be 20 feet long, house and support at least 400 more species, some of them also rare or endangered.
"We've long recognized that the gopher tortoise is crucial, a keystone species," Robertson said. How the state chooses to deal with the tortoises and their habitat, he said, "will come out in the wash."
Berish said that after years of work, the state's plan for managing gopher tortoises will reflect significant changes. Negotiations among developers, large landowners, scientists and environmentalists have been productive, she said -- a far cry from the stalemates over the Florida manatee. "I'm more optimistic today about the gopher tortoise than I have been in the past 25 years," she said.
The key, Berish said, "is to preserve habitat on local basis, manage habitat that needs to be managed, and restock tortoises where they need to be restocked." All of which takes time and money, and research to determine how this is best done.
Over the past decade, several studies have shed light on ways to relocate gopher tortoises so that they form colonies and reproduce, as opposed to wander off and die. Many developers now hire consultants to go above and beyond state law to ensure that the tortoises acclimate to a new area, and in Northwest Florida two new studies, partly funded by the state, will track relocated tortoises to see how they fare.
"You don't just dump tortoises off and hope they're gonna make it," Berish said. "You give them every chance."
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