Kemp's ridley sea turtle

Appearance

Typical of sea turtles, it has a dorsoventrally depressed body with specially adapted flipper-like front limbs and a beak. The adult's oval carapace is almost as wide as it is long and is usually olive-gray in color. The head has two pairs of prefrontal scales.

Kemp's ridley is the smallest of all sea turtle species, with a carapace length of 58–70 cm (23–28 in) and weight of only 36–45 kg (80–100 lb) at maturity.

Kemp's ridley turtle adults reach a maximum of 75 cm (30 in) in carapace length and weigh a maximum of 50 kg (110 lb).

Range and habitat

Adults primarily live in the Gulf of Mexico, where they forage in the relatively shallow waters of the continental shelf (up to 409 m deep, but typically 50 m or less), with females ranging from the southern coast of the Florida Peninsula to the northern coast of the Yucatán Peninsula, while males have a tendency to remain closer to the nesting beaches in the Western Gulf waters of Texas (US), Tamaulipas, and Veracruz (Mexico). Adults of L. Kempii are rarely found outside of the Gulf of Mexico and only 2–4% from the Atlantic are adults. Juveniles and subadults, in contrast, regularly migrate into the Atlantic Ocean and occupy the coastal waters of the continental shelf of North America from southern Florida to Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and occasionally northward.

In September 2007, Corpus Christi, Texas, wildlife officials found a record of 128 Kemp's ridley sea turtle nests on Texas beaches, among them 81 on North Padre Island (Padre Island National Seashore) and four on Mustang Island. As of June 13, 2025, 383 Kemp's ridley nests were documented on the Texas coast—breaking the previous record of 353 nests set in 2017 at Padre Island National Seashore.

Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.

Diet and breeding

Juveniles primarily are pelagic surface-feeders, while adults are opportunistic bottom-feeders that feed primarily on crabs. Research has shown that dives made by these turtles, among them those made to forage, may be longer at night.

Variation in habitat region, as well as prey availability, was found to alter diet composition. Regional diet compositions aid in conservation efforts through enabling predicting food sources becoming affected by major events. Males will typically stay closer to breeding grounds.

In crisis

Kemp's ridley sea turtle is listed as endangered under the Endangered Species Act (ESA), and conservation efforts are attempting to rebuild population numbers. Human activity, among them habitat destruction, climate change, and oil spills, threatens populations. Kemp's ridley sea turtle is currently listed as endangered under the Endangered Species Act (ESA).

Egg harvesting and poaching first depleted the numbers of Kemp's ridley sea turtles. Still, today, major threats include habitat loss, pollution, and entanglement in shrimping nets.

CITES lists this taxon on Appendix I. Confirm the current appendix on the CITES checklist.

Kemp's ridley sea turtle is Critically Endangered on this catalog because that is the IUCN category stored on Wikidata. Confirm the official criteria and any later count on iucnredlist.org.

Sources

Written for this catalog from the English Wikipedia article on Kemp's ridley sea turtle, Wikidata item Q301089. Family and order context is original field-guide writing about the group, not a copied assessment of this one species. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA. Not an IUCN assessment. Counts, when quoted, can change — confirm them on the recovery programme and on iucnredlist.org.