Spying on turtles?
A news item came across my desk today Dems Take Another Vacation From History with the fanciful claim that "DCI Environmental Center ... used spy satellites to monitor volcanoes and sea-turtle nests. It's worth pointing out that this is an opinion piece from a Republican representative of the US Congress.
Even so, it sounded pretty cool. Imagine being able to monitor sea turtle nesting activity from space? It would finally allow us to get a handle on all of those really out of the way sea turtle nesting sites. For example, I just returned from Gabon, which supposedly hosts the world's largest leatherback sea turtle nesting population. Unfortunately, the agencies and NGOs working there don't have the resources to properly monitor the entire coastline and any population estimates contain some pretty serious extrapolations. So what's the real population size?
Having said that, I am not aware of any publicly available satellite imagery of high enough resolution that would allow you to reliably count turtles from space. You would have to be able to distinguish individual turtle tracks in the morning or use some kind of night vision to count turtles at night (all night long to get a proper count). Morning track counts seem like a more reasonable option for a daily snapshot of nesting activity, but would require centimeter-level resolution to distinguish the tracks.
No problem. The story refers to "spy satellites", and my understanding is that the US has some pretty high-resolution spy satellites. Intriguing, so I decided to try to track down the source of this information. Googling "DCI Environmental Center" and "sea turtle" returned a couple more links that basically paraphrase the opinion piece published today.
From a press release on house.gov (7 May 2007): THE DEMOCRATS’ GLOBAL WAR ON WEATHER
Democrats Cut Intelligence Resources to Study Global Warming
“DCI Environmental Center” – notorious for wasting intelligence resources. The center diverted important spy satellite time to survey the polar ice caps and the nesting habits of sea turtles on beaches.
From the National Review (10 May 2007): Al Qaeda, Iran, North Korea — and Global Warming
Democrats assess the threats to U.S. national security
“They took pictures of volcanoes and sea turtle nests and took air samples of air pollution, as opposed to checking for traces of biological or chemical weapons, and it was all done at the behest of Al Gore,” says one Republican knowledgeable about intelligence affairs.
And more of the same...
http://www.inthebullpen.com/archives/category/national-security/
http://carter.house.gov/blog/
http://www.weeklystandard.com/weblogs/TWSFP/2007/05/
Sounds like they have been working from the same talking points or plagiarizing one another.
So where does that leave us? A bunch of "conservative" talking heads suggesting that "liberals" have tasked spy satellites to monitor sea turtles. Is there any basis in fact or was it completely made up? One would think that if they did do this there would be some purpose to it. That some sea turtle researcher out there would be involved and that the CIA would not just be randomly monitoring sea turtle beaches (why were they doing it and for whom specifically). Or perhaps the pundits are misinterpreting some non-spy satellite attempt to monitor sea turtles from space?
So, are there any sea turtlers out there that know anything about an effort to monitor sea turtle nesting from space?
