State: Gopher tortoise losing the race to development

Two ways of protecting the tortoises - digging them up to relocate them and testing them for disease before they are removed - have their shortcomings.

By CRAIG PITTMAN

Pity the poor gopher tortoise.

Homely as a prune, older than the dinosaurs, it is perpetually getting in the way of developers. To accommodate Florida's booming growth over the past decade, the state agency in charge of protecting tortoises has allowed 30,000 of them to be sealed up in their underground burrows and killed.

As a humane alternative to killing them, the state also has allowed developers to relocate thousands of tortoises to new homes out of harm's way. But that may have spread a respiratory infection among the gophers that has proved just as hazardous to them as being buried alive.

To combat the disease, the state Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission staff wants to change the rules on moving gophers. The new rules, set for public hearings next month, would require that before any colony of tortoises is yanked from its burrows, a few must be tested for the disease.

If the tests come back positive for the respiratory disease, then those tortoises cannot be relocated, said Brian Millsap, chief of the agency's bureau of wildlife diversity conservation.

Developers are not thrilled with the idea of having to foot the bill for tortoise blood tests.

"If the state's mandating these things be tested, they ought to pay for that cost," said Keith Hetrick of the Florida Home Builders Association.

A bigger problem than the cost could be the time it takes to get test results from the only laboratory in the state equipped for the job, a delay that could foul up building schedules.

"If you make him wait two months, a developer is going to go out of his mind," said Ray Ashton, a Gainesville environmental consultant with extensive experience in tortoise relocation work.

Yet state officials say this is only their first step in trying to change the way they protect the tortoise. Nobody knows for sure how many remain in Florida, but some biologists contend the gopher has edged close enough to extinction that it now belongs on the federal endangered species list.

"They're in trouble, they really are," said Henry Mushinsky, a University of South Florida biology professor who has studied tortoises. "And the fear is that we're taking diseased animals and moving them into healthy populations."

Tortoises are in so much trouble that gopher expert George Heinrich contends the state's proposed rule change "is putting a Band-Aid on a much bigger problem. What needs to be addressed is whether relocation should be occurring at all."

Heinrich, a ranger at Boyd Hill Nature Park in St. Petersburg who serves as co-chairman of a national scientific panel called the Gopher Tortoise Council, argues that relocating tortoises "is nothing more than a feel-good measure."

Relocated tortoises don't do well in their new homes and some even try to return to where they came from, putting them at risk of being run over by cars and trucks, he said.

Even worse, tortoises have been moved off one site to make room for development, and then in a year or so moved again when their new homes got in the way of more development, Heinrich said.

"I would like to see relocations stopped permanently," Heinrich said, "but that would require stopping the development of upland habitat, and that's not going to happen."

Gopher tortoises were once common throughout the Southeast, thriving in the scrub sandhills, oak hammocks and wiregrass flatwoods. First described by naturalist William Bartram in 1791, gophers were plentiful enough in Depression days that hungry Floridians nicknamed them "Hoover chickens."

The gopher digs burrows up to 40 feet long and 18 feet deep, creating a place where it can keep cool during the day and dodge predators. The burrows can also shelter 360 other species, including rabbits, armadillos, opossums and several frogs and snakes already on the endangered species list.

The places the gophers call home appeal to humans, too: The high, dry land is ideal for subdivision developments, shopping malls, new schools and new roads. But the gopher tortoise is classified as a "species of special concern" by the state, which means developers and builders are not supposed to wipe out their habitat willy-nilly.

They can get a permit to pave over the tortoise burrows -- but only if they write a check equal to several thousand dollars per acre to a state mitigation fund that goes to pay for preserving tortoise habitat elsewhere. Or they can get a free permit to move the tortoises, although they still have to pay someone to do the job.

Ashton said the current relocation system is "kind of a screwball way of doing things." Rarely does the state check on whether the people in charge of moving the tortoises have found all the burrows, handled the gophers properly or relocated them to a suitable new home, he said.

Recently, Ashton was hired to relocate gophers from land in Citrus County slated for development as a subdivision and discovered to his dismay that the consultant who had counted the number of tortoises to be moved had somehow missed half of them.

"It's the worst example I've ever seen," he said.

The only thing worse is what Ashton calls "the black market for tortoise movement." That's when the developer doesn't bother with a state permit "but just takes them out and dumps them somewhere."

If state wildlife officials are going to continue allowing developers to relocate tortoises, he said, they should charge a permit fee to pay for staff members to check up on the developers' work. The state also should require the people doing the relocation to pass some sort of certification test to prove they know what they're doing, he said.

As for testing for the respiratory disease, Ashton said, that's something tortoise experts recommended to the state nearly 10 years ago. "Anybody with any common sense would say you should test for the upper respiratory disease," he said.

But the latest research on the disease has uncovered something that may complicate the state's attempt to require tortoise tests.

It turns out there are a number of different strains of the disease, some worse than others, said Joan Berish, a biologist with the Fish and Wildlife Commission. The constant relocations also may be mixing the strains together.

More research is needed, she said, but as more and more habitat disappears, time is running out for the tortoise. "We are just going to have to come up with the best of the bad solutions," she said.

- Times researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this report.

Back to State news

Contact the Times | Privacy Policy
Standard of Accuracy | Terms, Conditions & Copyright

Special Links

Lucy Morgan

From the Times state desk