Threatened Gopher Tortoises From Hudson Get New Home In Panhandle

Recently in Hudson, an ancient species got a little help to make it through the 21st century.

In a win-win undertaking, animal welfare and environmental protection organizations joined forces with a developer to move 114 gopher tortoises. The slow-moving reptiles were transplanted from the 10-acre Hudson Apartments housing development site at S. R. 52, in the Hudson area, to Nokuse Plantation, a 50,000-acre private conservation area in Walton County, in the Panhandle.

It was one of what the Humane Society hopes will be other future partnerships with developers to relocate the tortoises. A grant from the Orlando-based Folke H. Peterson Foundation funded the project.

It was an undertaking her company fully supported, said Shannon Lee, development associate with The Richman Group of Florida. The West Palm Beach-based firm could not have done the tortoise relocation on its own because of the cost, she said.

The Humane Society of the United States and Carissa Kent and David Commodario, a couple from Orlando, handled the four-day project of finding the tortoises in their burrows and transporting them to the relocation site.

Care taken

The operation involved a combination of careful soil removal by back hoe and digging by hand into the burrows, which can be as much as 18 feet deep and 25 feet long. The tortoises were transported by rented van to the Nokuse Plantation. They were released the following day to an area marked off by perimeter fencing to make sure adults didn't try to return to their Hudson burrows.

The Humane Society estimates it has helped relocated 1,000 tortoises to date and is trying to find other developers willing to allow the tortoise relocations. Kent and Commodario have partnered with the Humane Society in other relocation projects and have also have relocated the reptiles on their own.

"There's something about the animal," Kent said. "It has survived millions of years, and now we're destroying them. It just isn't right."

According to Matt Aresco, biologist and conservation director at Nokuse Plantation, the tortoises are "docile, slow moving, not aggressive. They just live out their lives."

They are social animals, Aresco said, living in colonies and visiting one another's burrows. They have been around for 20 million years, Aresco noted. Individuals can live 50 years or longer.

The tortoises are what biologists call a keystone species, a species necessary for the existence of other animals. "Many species use those burrows," he explained, including rare and endangered animals such as the gopher frog, Florida mouse and eastern indigo snake.

Threatened

Gopher tortoises are listed as a threatened species in Florida. According to Jennifer Hobgood, Florida state director of the Humane Society of the United States. Since 1991 the state has allowed the destruction of an estimated 104,000 of the animals through its "incidental take" program.

The program required developers to pay a fee for the habitat their projects would destroy but did not require them to move the animals to another site. As a result, the animals were often buried alive, trapped in their own burrows, and underwent a slow, painful death.

In 2007, after facing a public outcry over the fate of the tortoises, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission voted to end the permit program but did not rescind previously issued permits, allowing those developments to proceed without removing the tortoises.

According to Hobgood, since 1991, projects allowing developers to bury the animals alive cover an estimated 6,000 gopher tortoises in Pasco County. The Hudson site had one of the highest densities of gopher tortoises he has encountered, biologist Aresco said. He theorized that was due to the human development of suitable turtle habitats in the area.

The tortoises like to live on the sandy upland areas that also make good building sites for houses and apartments.

The tortoise friends, however, are not making developers the bad guys. Like Richman, many developers are eager to cooperate with the rescue.

"We go for the positive," tortoise rescuer Kent said. "That's what works."