Untamed: The Wildest Woman in America and the Fight for Cumberland Island (33 page)

By summer, the shrimp—now several inches long—swim back out to the ocean, where fleets of trawlers waited for them. Shrimpers drag their enormous nets only a few hundred yards from the beaches where sea turtles nest.

Fleets of commercial shrimp boats—some the size of small cruise ships—trawl the south Georgia coast. They tow their huge weighted nets across the seabed, pulverizing the ocean floor. Miles of corals, sponges, and kelp forests that have taken centuries to grow are mowed down in a few hours, leaving behind vast ocean deserts. It’s the most destructive activity in the ocean, outstripping even oil drilling in its impacts. An area twice the size of the contiguous United States is razed and denuded each year by trawling.

The trawlers’ nets catch shrimp—as well as every other living sea creature in their path. For every pound of shrimp harvested in a trawl net, over ten pounds of bycatch is caught. Air-breathing animals such as dolphins and sea turtles drown in the nets.

Shrimping wasn’t always so supersized. Up until the early twentieth century, most shrimp were caught with cast nets, like the one Jesse used to throw from the Candler dock. Shrimp boats were small, and their catch was targeted. Eventually, fishermen began utilizing rowboats and even real horse power to drag nets along the beach. Global fisheries did not reach ten million total pounds until 1900. Then, with the rise of fossil-fueled fleets, commercial fisheries doubled their catch by 1950. They began doubling their catch every decade, and by 1980, they raked in eighty million pounds of shrimp each year.

Carol found shrimp in the stomach of the first dead turtle she necropised on Cumberland Island in 1973. She also noted the turtle’s dented skull and broken pectoral girdle, a horseshoe-shaped neck bone. How could a turtle break its neck in the ocean? The only possibility was from falling out of a net onto a boat deck. Bloody lungs and lactate-filled muscles were other clues that pointed toward one obvious suspect: trawlers.

But shrimping was a $200 million industry in south Georgia. She needed more than one dead turtle to make her case. So she set about necropsying every single turtle carcass that washed onto Cumberland Island. Hundreds had been washing ashore every summer for years, but nobody had ever bothered to find out why. It was smutty, smelly work on animals with little commercial value. She studied their spilled guts to find out why they were dying.

Sea turtles were protected under the Endangered Species Act—a rudimentary bill of rights for nature. But in south Georgia, where the shrimping industry—the world’s largest commercial fishery—dominated the coastal economy, rules were rarely enforced, and shrimpers had routinely flouted the law to maximize their catch. Turtles were often killed so they would not repeatedly end up feasting on the shrimp in trawlers’ nets.

As soon as the state opened its waters to shrimp boats in early spring, sea turtle strandings spiked. Carol could barely keep up with the work. Each turtle necropsy required two hours of rancid, sweat-drenched work on the beach and hours more back in her lab.

Carol’s data from Cumberland was convincing: the number of dead turtles was steadily increasing each year, and all of the postmortem evidence pointed to trawls. But Bob pointed out a hole in her data: all of her necropsies were from a single island. So in the early 1980s, Carol created the Sea Turtle Stranding Network. She contacted other biologists and volunteers on every island from the Carolinas to Florida to collect data on dead turtles washing ashore. She trained some of them to conduct basic necropsies. Others simply counted the number of turtle carcasses on the beach. After a few years, the volunteer network had amassed the world’s largest stranded sea turtles databank. The patterns Carol had recorded on Cumberland played out on every other Southern shore. Trawls were killing endangered turtles.

Like other scientists, Carol was a data-driven, detail-oriented biologist who insisted on absolute accuracy and meticulous research. But unlike her colleagues, she combined her research with activism. Most of the scientists she met at turtle conferences tended to write technical papers for obscure academic publications. They were trained to divorce feelings from facts. They shied away from advocacy and rarely shared their research with the general public.

Carol was different. She didn’t dress the part. She had no job or ego at stake. She just wanted to save the damn sea turtles. Even though everyone in the scientific community agreed that turtles were in trouble, few did anything about it.

“Scientists never scream,” she said, nudging Bob.

So Carol decided to make some noise.

In the mid-1980s, Carol’s Sea Turtle Stranding Network made national headlines, and Carol made new enemies. Shrimpers didn’t like a female biologist poking her beak where it didn’t belong. Shrimping fed families. Turtles got in the way of their trawls and ate the shrimp out of their nets. “The fewer turtles, the better,” a south Georgia shrimper once told her.

Carol presented her data to the National Marine Fisheries Service, which was responsible for both promoting the shrimp industry and protecting endangered sea turtles. Managed by the Department of Commerce, the Fisheries Service usually followed the money instead of the Endangered Species Act.

Carol met with the fisheries administrator at the regional headquarters in Florida. “Loggerhead strandings increase dramatically as soon as waters are opened to shrimp boats each season,” she told them. “Trawlers are the leading cause of death for sea turtles.”

The fisheries administrator cast a sideways glance at the other officials in the room. “Miss, uh . . . Miss Turtleshell,” he said, a mispronunciation of her last name, Ruckdeschel. (Turtleshell became a nickname that has stuck with her for life.) “Your data is persuasive. But our agency is also charged with managing the country’s shrimping industry, which provides thousands of jobs and feeds the nation. We can’t just close the coast to trawls.”

“Why not? At the very least, create a trawl-free reserve along a portion of the coast,” she said. A reserve would provide a baseline control to assess how sea turtles fared without trawls in the water, she argued. It would also allow shrimp and fish populations to recover and the seafloor to regrow. “It could provide a powerful point of comparison.”

“Closures of any kind are not economically feasible,” the administrator replied. “But we’ll work with you to come up with other solutions.”

Instead of creating a reserve, the National Marine Fisheries Service agreed to expand Carol’s Sea Turtle Stranding Network. It soon became a nationwide program with a full-time staff collecting dead turtle data from Maine to Texas. More dead turtles than ever were washing ashore. Even the National Academy of Sciences bolstered Carol’s research, concluding that shrimp trawlers killed over fifty thousand sea turtles each year.

The feds couldn’t deny the problem. But they couldn’t solve it either. Trawlers had far more clout than turtles. They needed a middle-ground solution that slowed sea turtle deaths but still kept shrimpers happy.

They found it just a few miles north of Cumberland in the coastal town of Darien, the shrimp capital of the South. Its fleet of 250 trawlers was the largest in Georgia. At the beginning of shrimping season in Darien, hundreds of shrimp boats paraded through town, adorned with wreaths and lights. Clergymen blessed the fleet, sprinkling holy water across their decks as they passed beneath a bridge.

Several of those blessed boats belonged to Sinkey Boone, a legendary local captain whose family was synonymous with south Georgia shrimping. But Sinkey was more than a shrimper. He was a welder, net maker, purveyor of folk wisdom, and eccentric inventor. One afternoon, Sinkey Boone sat on the wet warehouse docks of Darien sewing a barbecue grill into his shrimp trawl. Fellow shrimpers puzzled at the fifth-generation shrimp boat captain intentionally cutting a hole in his net.

“Sinkey, I know you’ve been shrimping for a long time,” said a fellow Darien shrimper. “But why in hellfire are you adding holes to your net? It’s hard enough just to keep ’em patched!”

Frustrated by the amount of jellyfish clogging his trawl nets, Sinkey had recently developed a net with an oval-shaped metal grate sewn into it. Shrimp could pass between the grills, but jellyfish were stopped by the grate and diverted out an escape hatch. As an added bonus, the modified net shunted pesky sea turtles out of the nets, too. They were blocked by the barbecue grill and directed out the exit flap.

The feds visited Sinkey Boone’s net-making shop on the Darien docks and liked what they saw. His new trawl net—which they called a turtle excluder device, or TED—was the perfect solution to their turtle troubles. Shrimpers could continue trawling, but turtles would not drown in the nets. Fewer turtles would wash up on beaches, keeping Carol off their backs. And because the turtle excluder device was designed by one of their own, shrimpers would be more likely to use it.

In 1987, the National Marine Fisheries Service required a turtle excluder device in all commercial trawls nationwide. Sinkey began mass producing TEDs in his Darien shop, but shrimpers didn’t take to them as well as he and the feds had hoped.

Shrimpers fought vigorously against feds and the TEDs, fearful that TEDs would cause them to lose shrimp and profits. Government studies had shown that TEDs cause less than a 4 percent reduction in catch, but shrimpers claimed the number was closer to 25 percent.

The shrimpers felt caught in the net of government regulation. They didn’t take kindly to federal officials boarding their boats to ensure the TEDs were installed properly. And they didn’t like turtle-hugging hippies like Carol telling them how to do their job. One shrimper described her as “a bleedin’-heart hippie woman runnin’ around half-nekkid who’d rather put hard-workin’ fishermen outta business than hurt any animals.”

Shrimpers pointed out that trawls weren’t the only turtle-killing nets. Thousands of turtles were killed each year by tuna fishermen using mile-long drift nets floating freely in the ocean. Even more were killed by longlines. But shrimpers’ biggest beef was with the Endangered Species Act itself, which they believed prioritized turtles over people. Shrimpers argued that turtles weren’t truly threatened. They claimed that their populations had rebounded, which is why more turtles were being caught in trawls.

“It’s the shrimper who is endangered,” said Clint Guidry, a third-generation shrimper. “Our way of life is under attack by people who don’t know what the hell they’re talking about.”

In the summer of 1989, Southern shrimpers banded together to launch the TED Wars. An armada of shrimp boats, some flying skull-and-crossbones flags, formed blockades into Southern ports to protest TED rules. Gunshots were fired, windows were broken, and Coast Guard boats were rammed by shrimpers. Later, thousands of angry shrimpers mobbed a TED hearing in Louisiana, and the state police had to be deployed to maintain order. Some shrimpers took their frustrations out on the turtles, which began washing ashore with mutilated bodies.

After the violent summer of ’89, the U.S. Department of Commerce caved in and suspended the TED rules. Environmental groups sued in court to reinstate them and won, but the judge left a gaping loophole: shrimpers did not have to use TEDs if they checked their nets every hour for turtles.

Even with the loophole, many shrimpers ignored the law and continued to drag nets without TEDs. They evaded enforcement by alerting each other via radio when feds were boarding nearby boats.

Meanwhile, environmentalists rallied behind TEDs and began pushing for their use worldwide. In 1998, Seattle protesters took to the streets in turtle costumes demanding that the World Trade Organization require turtle excluder devices in trawlers worldwide. That effort failed, but TEDs are still mandatory in all American waters.

With TEDs in place, Carol looked forward to studying living turtles instead of dead ones. She hoped her sixteen-hour days on the beach wallowing in mashed, maggot-ridden turtle carcasses were over. But deep down, she suspected that TEDs would not stop the slaughter.

Still, she made plans to study her other favorite reptile, the alligator, whose numbers were also crashing across the South. The island offered an ideal natural laboratory for studying them. And her blind buddy Ray enabled her to observe gator behavior up close. She was especially interested in how gators bromated, which involved burrowing in the mud and lowering their body temperatures. In this torpid, slumberous state gators could go for months—even years—without eating.

But the dead turtles kept coming, even after TEDs were first required in 1989. Turtle stranding rates steadily increased over the next fifteen years. Thousands of sea turtle carcasses continued to litter the coast, and those represented just a fraction of the fatalities. Fewer than 5 percent of dead turtles actually washed ashore. Most carcasses sank or were eaten by sharks.

Despite mandatory TEDs, Carol necropsied more dead turtles than ever before. There was only one obvious conclusion: TEDs were not protecting turtles.

Carol was the first to publicly recognize the problem. Many shrimpers were still dodging the law and not installing TEDs properly—or at all. But the bigger failure was the TEDs themselves. Turtles caught in trawls often spent over an hour trapped in the nets before they were shunted out by TEDs. The panicked turtles, unable to surface for air, used up their oxygen thrashing, flailing, and trying to escape. They went into irreversible shock and either drowned or floated comatose until they eventually collided with the TED. The half-dead turtles were diverted out of the net, but by then it was usually too late.