Spectators formed two lines on the beach, creating a makeshift runway leading down to the Gulf of Mexico.

Volunteers then pulled recently rehabilitated Kemp’s Ridley turtles out of 30-gallon plastic containers and showed them off to the beachgoers, who eagerly snapped photos of the endangered reptile before they were released into the Gulf. Onlookers cheered the turtles as they slowly shimmied toward the water, whooping and applauding as the turtles were submerged by the surf, their jagged, pointed shells peeking above the surface.

On a breezy Wednesday morning at Stewart Beach in Galveston, roughly 150 to 200 people gathered to catch an up-close look at 10 of the rarest sea turtles in the world.

The event, organized by the National Marine Fisheries Service, was designed to give the public a glimpse of the species, but it was also indicative of the myriad challenges the Kemp’s Ridley turtles face as they continually try to ward off extinction. All of the turtles released Wednesday were found stranded in poor health due to human activity — caught in recreational fishing lines, or badly injured by a fishing hook, or inadvertently hit by boats cruising in the Gulf. Several of the turtles were even found as tiny hatchlings and nursed back to full strength over two years.

“People called [the turtles] in, we collected them, we took blood from them, we took X-rays, figured out what’s wrong with them, and just gave them basically warm water, medication and good food and now they’re all healed and ready to go,” said Ben Higgins, the sea turtle program manager for the National Marine Fisheries Service.

Now Playing:

The rehabilitation of injured Kemp’s Ridley — a rather small sea turtle with a shell roughly 30 inches in diameter — is part of an ongoing, binational operation to save the population. The population has severely declined from its peak in the mid-20th Century, when tens of thousands of sea turtles would blanket the shores of Rancho Nuevo in Mexico in one day. These days, turtle researchers count themselves lucky to spot an “arribada” — large groups of turtles nesting on the beach — and rely heavily on beachgoers and volunteers to keep an eye out for tiny nests filled with roughly 60 to 100 eggs in the dunes along the Texas coast.

“It’s a little early to tell but last year we had a record number, so this year will for sure be lower than last year,” said Chris Marshall, a professor of marine biology and wildlife and fisheries sciences at Texas A&M University at Galveston.

'VERY DANGEROUS': Feral hogs menacing homeowners in Liberty, San Jacinto counties

The Kemp's ridley was near extinction before U.S. and Mexican government efforts begun in the late 1970s saved the species. The Kemp's ridley numbers increased slowly until the early 2000s. Then came the 2010 oil spill.

The main nesting grounds are in Rancho Nuevo, Tamaulipas State, Mexico. But Donna Shaver, the director of the Sea Turtle Science and Recovery Division of the Padre Island National Seashore, has headed an effort since 1998 to establish a secondary nesting site at the Padre Island National Seashore.

In 2017, Marshall and his partners in the Upper Texas Coast Sea Turtle Patrol found 353 nests, which blew the previous records away. The nest yield so far this year has been slower, with 147 nests found on the entire Texas coast.

Part of the year-to-year decline can be attributed to the turtles’ two- to three-year nesting cycles, but also to the overall health of the turtles themselves. If female Kemp’s Ridleys don’t have enough fat or nutrients to carry eggs, nesting cycles can extend as long as five years.

But Marshall and his partner in the sea turtle patrol, Joanie Steinhaus of Turtle Island Restoration Network, are doing their part to help stave off the attrition of the Kemp’s Ridleys. Volunteers for the Upper Texas Coast Sea Turtle Patrol — a statewide effort run by Shaver — comb a 65-mile stretch of coastline from Rollover Pass to Freeport, looking for tiny divots in the dunes where sea turtles will come to shore, lay their eggs and then leave them behind on the beach for good.

Once the nests are spotted, volunteers excavate them and pack them into climate-controlled Styrofoam containers. The eggs are then transported to Padre Island, where Shaver monitors them at an incubation facility. Sex in sea turtles like the Kemp’s Ridley is determined by nest temperature — “Hot chicks and cool dudes” is the general rule of thumb, according to Marshall — so researchers make sure to keep the incubation temperatures as high as possible to produce female turtles that will, hopefully, help sustain the sea turtle population well into the future.

Marshall said the success rate for hatching sea turtles at the incubation facility is about 95 percent. If the eggs were left on the beach, that rate could be as low as 35 percent — or zero.

“Up here on the upper Texas coast, this is outside the historical range for the species and we’ve had a lot of beach erosion over the last decade,” Marshall said. “If we leave the nest here, usually they’ll be inundated with high tide at some point or they’ll be predated on. Dogs, cats, raccoons, even coyotes, will dig up and eat the eggs.”

Of course, animal predators are the least of the species’ worries when they are ready to be released back in the wild. Already during this nesting season, turtle patrol volunteers have found badly injured turtles.

Steinhaus reported that one Kemp’s Ridley turtle was found with a shoelace wrapped around its flipper attached to a small trash can that was pulling it under the surf. Another turtle was found with a balloon ribbon wrapped around its neck, nearly decapitating it. Both are being nursed back to health, but their condition is emblematic of the species’ uneasy coexistence with humans.

“The biggest threats still continue to be human activities,” Shaver said. “Incidental capture due to fisheries operations, that is thought to also play a big role in their decline.”

To that end, Higgins and his team at the National Marine Fisheries Service are working closely with commercial fisheries to ensure the health of the sea turtles. Some of those studied by Higgins are used to develop “turtle-friendly” fishing gear.

A COMEBACK? See how the bat colony is faring at the Waugh bridge

“We test it, certify it and then we make the fishermen use that and it lets the turtles escape from a shrimp trawl with a turtle excluder device, or we also do a lot of work with baited hooks in the swordfish fishery,” Higgins said.

But still, the Kemp’s Ridley population remains more or less stagnant. It will likely remain an endangered species for the foreseeable future.

“There was hope that by 2020 that we would have so many Kemp’s Ridleys that we would be able to downgrade it” from endangered, Shaver said. “We’re still hopeful, but not by 2020. It’s a tough life for a Kemp’s Ridley.”