Hurricane Helene storm surge relocates dozens of Egmont Key tortoises to Fort De Soto

Hurricane sweeps gopher tortoises to Fort De Soto

Kailey Tracy reports.

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. - Visitors to Fort De Soto may notice some new residents. Experts say they’re monitoring 84 tortoise burrows at Fort De Soto, which is 10 times the number of burrows there before Hurricane Helene.

"Somewhere kind of in that 50 to 100 is a number that I’ve heard that made their way to Fort De Soto," Jeffrey Goessling, an associate professor of biology at Eckerd College, said.

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Goessling studies tortoises and said Hurricane Helene’s storm surge carried several gopher tortoises miles from Egmont Key to Fort De Soto.

"I would suspect they went through a pretty harrowing couple of hours," he said.

"We have to assume that the animals that washed over shore were probably in their burrows, and so, this speaks to the real force that this hurricane had, and that if we have an animal three, four, five feet underground, the storm surge was enough to rip that kind of top layer of surface off. And when it did that, again, it's taking with it a bunch of brush debris vegetation, but also kind of taking these animals with it," he said.

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Goessling said they know the tortoises came from Egmont Key, because they bare markings used by researchers to identify Egmont tortoises. He said, unfortunately, some of the tortoises didn’t survive the voyage.

"Mortality is, unfortunately, part of this kind of historical process of living in coastal areas. Some will survive and be pioneers into a new site," he said.

Goessling said they can swim, but don’t like to and don’t like the water at all, but will inflate their lungs and float. He said a couple of tortoises also washed up on St. Pete Beach two years ago.

"This is pretty common to tortoise kind of evolutionary history along the Gulf Coast, is that they are sometimes susceptible to getting picked up by storms and carried distances," Goessling said.

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What you can do:

Gopher tortoises, their eggs and their burrows are all protected by Florida law, and it’s illegal to disturb them. You can report a sighting to the Florida Fish and Wildlife on its website.

"Any kind of disturbance to the burrow or disturbance to the animal Is not only illegal, but it also just, it could have a real negative impact on these animals," Goessling said.

What's next:

Goessling said he and other local experts already planned this summer to assess how many gopher tortoises are on Egmont Key compared to how many have been relocated by storms, and the most recent storms give them even more of a reason to do that.

Gopher tortoise day is April 10.

The Source: The information in this story was gathered through an interview with Jeffrey Goessling, an associate professor of biology at Eckerd College.

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