First Cold-Stunned Sea Turtle Rescued on Cape Cod
— 24 October 2003
The first cold-stunned sea turtle of 2003 stranded on Orleans’ Skaket Beach with this morning’s high tide, tossed ashore by sustained 20-knot west-northwest winds with gust reaching to 30. Temperatures on the Outer Cape barely cleared 40 degrees and the bay broiled in briny white caps and swayed in rolling surf. In other words, today was the type of day one would expect to find a cold-stunned tropical sea turtle — except it’s at least a week too early. The 2002 stranding season began on 2 November, 2001 on 7 November, and 2000 on 1 November.
Each fall, tropical and semi-tropical sea turtles get trapped in Cape Cod Bay by plunging temperatures. They become “cold-stunned” as bay water drops below 50 degrees Fahrenheit and fall to the mercy of wind and surf. It takes sustained winds to drive these torpid critters shoreward, and then the high tide deposits them on the wrack line. If rescuers can get to the turtles soon after they become stranded, the animals will survive and after medical treatment and rehabilitation, they will be returned to the wild. The vast majority of these stranded turtles are the critically endangered Kemp’s ridleys, the rarest sea turtle in the world. Others we will see during a stranding season include loggerheads and green sea turtles.
This year’s first is a relatively lively juvenile Kemp’s ridley, probably 2 years old, measuring a tad under 8.5 inches long and weighing 3.5 pounds. A very heavy matting of algae covered its carapace except for the “halo” in the center where we speculate that surface basking may prevent algae growth. The plastron was pinkish as blood had begun to pool from the animal’s extremely low heart rate brought on by cold-stunning.
After cleaning the algae, I was surprised to see lightly bleeding abrasions that had been buried underneath the matting. These abrasions, plus nicks on the carapace and along the keel and on the back marginals, hint at some battering this turtle endured, probably even before the algae growth had begun to build up as a cushion.
Settling down for the night as it awaits transport to the New England Aquarium in the morning, our first rescued
ridley of the year is breathing normally, moving well, and looks strikingly handsome in its newly polished condition. All in all, a nice way to begin our 2003 rescues, even if the early start portends a long and perhaps very large stranding event.
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